Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Hi, guys, better late than never,” Bobbie said as she stepped into the room and all conversation was suspended. Wayne had picked Bobbie up at work and she hadn’t bothered to go home and change but had come to the party in a black, pleated miniskirt, fishnet stockings and go-go boots. She pulled her head-scarf free and her platinum hair fanned out across her back. “Did I miss anything?”

  “This is Mike,” Bernice said.

  “Well, what a surprise,” Bobbie said and shot a look at Lureen which said, is she kidding?

  Claude jumped up. “What are you drinking?”

  “I’ll help myself,” she said in her throaty voice. “I’m not crippled.”

  “I can see that.”

  Lureen felt the bald hunger in the men’s eyes as Bobbie left the room and for a moment, she resented her.

  Only Mike seemed unaffected, and Wayne, Bobbie’s husband, who was dark and silent. When he sat down, he crossed his legs and folded his arms across his broad chest. “Once a Month Wayne,” Bobbie complained about their sexual activity during their bitch and brag afternoons. Lureen thought Wayne was the perfect example of a man who would go berserk and shoot his family on a quiet Sunday afternoon and everyone would be surprised. He was a polite man who kept to himself, they would say when interviewed.

  “That’s a real nice outfit,” Mike said.

  “I couldn’t see myself in a get-up like that,” Bernice said.

  “I guess not.” Claude laughed loudly.

  “Get Bernice,” they heard Bobbie tell Marlene in the kitchen, “her idea of dressing up is to wear pantyhose under her ski pants.”

  Bernice swung her leg up and down, up and down. Mike leaned forward and said something. She shrugged his arm from her shoulder. “You don’t have to say that,” she said, “I know what I look like.”

  Bobbie came back into the room and handed Wayne his drink. She hesitated and then went over to the couch and squeezed in beside Mike. “I’ve been serving drinks all night,” she said. “What’s one more?” She smiled at Mike and put her hand on his arm. “I guess you would know all about sore feet,” she said.

  Wayne shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. Bernice smiled at him and continued to swing her foot up and down. “Know why you wouldn’t catch me in a get-up like that?” she asked and everyone stopped talking to listen.

  “Some people care what they look like,” Wayne said.

  “Nope,” she said, “it’s because I’m made like Phyllis Diller. My legs don’t go up that far.”

  The guy’s obviously retarded, had been Bobbie’s sullen comment when the women had washed up the dishes following the party. Lureen pulled the pink dress over her head and threw it onto the bed. Retarded. Clueless, all of them, wanting to hide behind such a statement. She’d wanted to explain it to them, the matter of grace. It’s grace, she should have said. Bernice has grace. She stood still, listening as a car passed in the lane. Although it was almost midnight, Larry was still not home. She stood looking out the window for a moment at the row of houses behind the fences, in front of them the telephone poles and the lines that connected her to Larry. She liked the telephone poles. They reminded her of gardens and woodpeckers telegraphing messages between the lines of time-splintered wood. She imagined her mother’s street, silent and white beneath the moon. Her mother was crawling about on her hands and knees or reaching for a suitable hiding place for the Easter baskets. She saw the frosted Paska bread, lined up on the table, one for everyone. She wiped her eyes on her underslip. She stood in the hallway and listened to the quiet sound of her children breathing. And then she went into the kitchen and put the chicken back into the freezer. She took out the ham. Tomorrow, she would try something new with it. Marlene had suggested, stick it full of cloves and baste it with beer.

  TORONTO STREET

  ruda sat out on the veranda facing Toronto Street and watched the Chinese student in the apartment block across the street as he, narrow and thin, bent over his books studying. He’d been sitting motionless for an hour. His shoulders looked pale and impotent beneath the overhead light. All his strength lay beneath the stroke of his blue-black hair, a thick wing across his forehead. At the top of the apartment block, the fifth floor, the setting sun banded the brick face in brilliant ochre. On the second floor where the student bent over his books, deep shadows had mounted the wall during the hour as she’d sat and watched and the student had moved only once, to turn on the light.

  In her ears, the dreary rhythm of the long bus ride into Winnipeg echoed like waves caught in a conch shell and when she closed her eyes, the highway rose before her in flashing white lines. She leaned back into the dusty wicker chair and gave in to her weariness. She would be able to sit as the student did, motionless for hours, and not think about anything. Not think about Brian. Or that she had just rented this dismal, damp house on Toronto Street with its strange smell. Not very clever, Brian would say.

  The wicker chair cracked sharply as she pulled her dress straight. Polyester, blue-grey to match her eyes, no ironing required. When she’d dressed, she’d chosen the outfit carefully. But as she’d knotted the scarf at her throat, the ever-present scarf which was supposed to bring the eye up to her wide friendly face and away from her spreading bottom, she felt sick. How colour-coordinated and safe she was! No loose ends. She worked at appearing to be self-possessed, perhaps a hint of sex in the way she wore her hair, silver-tipped and carefree. Her hair, a slight flickering aberration in the total look, the Total Woman, the Banker’s Wife uniform. I don’t care how much it costs, she’d often said to the girls at the Kinette meetings. It’s important to me, the way I feel about myself, whether my hair looks good or not. Her careful preparations embarrassed her now. Since she’d got off the bus, she felt diminished, almost invisible. If she’d arrived stark naked it wouldn’t have made any difference.

  She had managed to pry loose several windows in the veranda and a breeze lifted and swept down the narrow alley between the apartment block and the Bronzing Company across the street. The breeze sucked heat from her skin as she rocked in the previous tenant’s wicker chair and watched the Chinese student. She wanted to stay in the veranda awhile before confronting the night. The previous tenant hadn’t used the veranda, she could judge that from the absence of odours. In the house, the air, heavy with the smell of pipe smoke, stale food and mildew, had as its base something else, a tinge of ammonia; bitterness, she concluded. In the veranda, the odour of street dust and the dry scent of newspapers stacked all along one wall made her feel safe. Neutral ground. The weariness lifted. She reached for the overnight bag on the floor. Her fingers found the Tupperware containers of fruit, vegetables and hard-boiled eggs. She arranged the containers on the floor and unwrapped several pieces of buttered bread. She had prepared the food in her own kitchen, furtively, not because she needed to be secretive, Brian had known she was leaving, but because she felt guilty about being able to think of food. It was like the time Brian had the accident with the saw and she’d come home from work and read his message to meet him at the hospital. When she saw the splatters, the amount of blood in the sink, she knew the accident had been serious and so she’d made herself a sandwich because she knew she wouldn’t feel like eating once she got there.

  As shadows mounted the brick wall across the street, it seemed to Truda that the sound of traffic on Notre Dame Avenue had risen and funnelled now into Toronto Street, echoing dully beneath the arch of trees, sounding like rushing water. When she got off the bus on Ellice Avenue that afternoon, her impression of Toronto Street had been one of gaiety, colourful houses, vivid shades of yellow, lime green and pink, windowboxes and a truck tire painted white with geraniums growing in the centre of it. There were children, bare-chested, clad in sagging diapers or blue jean cut-offs, astride bicycles, lolling in strollers or squatting, and fingers prying stones loose from cracks in the sidewalk. She wanted to kneel beside them to touch their dusty heads. I can live here, she’d told herself, feeling hopeful and
lighthearted, the same way she’d felt about the house Brian had built. The extra bedrooms for their children. She imagined herself in a brightly coloured skirt. A peasant skirt. Did they still sell them? She would let her hair grow once again to its natural length, down between her shoulder blades. She would buy cookies and be a cookie-at-the-door person because children liked her.

  A grocery store on the corner leaned precariously to one side, several broken windows. Where would she buy food, she’d wondered, if she didn’t have a car? Unless she bought one of those fold-down carts she’d seen other women use. Older women, who shopped wearing funny outdated hats, concealing their loneliness beneath circles of pink rouge or pious or overly friendly mannerisms, or the others, the stooped sour ones with heavy scarves knotted tightly beneath chins, stealthily counting out change from their plastic change purses.

  She’d memorized the advertisement. Two bedrooms, it said, a veranda, lots of light. She had pictured a place with clean, broad windows, curtainless, because she fancied the implications of a curtainless window, of an ivy growing up the casement. In Winnipeg, people don’t know their neighbours. People are unfriendly. You won’t be able to go out alone at night, Brian said, not because he was trying to dissuade her but to give her the facts. Always the facts. Truda thought differently. There would be welcome freedom in anonymity. She had imagined high white ceilings in the house and pottery cradling plants all along broad sills. Not this low-slung cottage with its one long room, two cramped bedrooms exposed off it, the bathroom off the kitchen; not sanitary. But what had helped her decide to take it was the round oak dining table. The table was an antique, the house, old. She distrusted the formal comfort of new houses. The comfort that sapped energy in the end, the form: the predictable arrangement of floral and flocked furniture, the white sheers on bay windows, the heavy valance and drapery, the seascape above the couch, breakers curled and forever suspended in their crash against the rocks.

  The sudden blaring of a car horn punctuated the echoing rush of traffic, startling her. She looked up. The Chinese student flicked through pages in a book. Newspapers flipped up suddenly, rifled by the breeze which had risen quickly, swooped down between the buildings into the veranda. Truda swung around to face the door behind her, expecting to see something, someone standing there. I’ll take the house, she’d said to the voice on the telephone because of the falling night, the old house. He was confined to a wheelchair, the slightly nasal voice stated. He was pretty old. Clean up the place and I’ll throw in a month’s free rent. Had he ever bothered? Truda wondered as she hung up the telephone. From the looks of the place, no. The voice had promised to come around one day to meet her and haul away the junk from the basement.

  Look kid, get used to it, Truda told herself and pressed her hand against her chest to try to still the thrashing. Get used to it. She had read articles on being alone, on separating. She had done the test. Imagined herself eating alone, sleeping alone, shopping alone. She had prepared, even though this wasn’t a real separation, but a temporary thing. A chance for her to find out if she wanted to go back to school, Brian said to their friends.

  But even though she wanted to confront the aloneness, she was flooded with relief at the sight of two people, a man and a woman bathed in a slice of light as they stepped out from the house next door. She sat up straighter to make herself more visible. The people became dark forms as they stooped and sat down on the top step. From their hands came the tinkle of ice against glass. The small, compact woman leaned her coppery head towards the man and spoke intimately in the husky voice of someone who smoked too much. Truda’s loins leapt with desire at the man’s low murmur, his laughing reply. She had seen the woman earlier, during the afternoon when she’d walked around the block, trying to come to a decision about the house. The sunburned woman had come from the house wearing a scanty bikini. Their eyes met. Hello, Truda had said. Can you tell me where a person would buy groceries? she was going to ask. Or where is the nearest bank? The woman turned from her and went back into the house, leaving her feeling foolish and slighted. She searched the street to see if anyone had seen. Above, trees met in a canopy of green, the colour changing in the movement of hot air. Across the street, two children straddled bicycles, their faces shimmering and changing shape in the dappled shadows as they stared back at her.

  Use it or lose it, Truda had read. She put her hand between her legs to try to still the ache. A woman should have sex twice a week, at least. That will keep her young and vibrant. Keep her from drying out. The couple leaned forward, elbows on knees, voices low, the man’s interrupted as he drew on his cigarette. Around her, darkness sifted from the corners of the veranda, a fine powdery blackness which would soon cover her. Her foot searched for and found the overnight bag. It was all she had. The rest of her things she’d packed in two boxes and sent on ahead on the transfer. She had only to call when she got in to have them delivered, the man in the transfer office had promised, but she had called several times and there was no answer. Should she believe the bored voice on the telephone, the landlord, that he would ever appear? Above the apartment block the translucent sky, still water radiating a sun about to slip into its surface.

  She folded the Saran wrap carefully and pushed it down into the side pocket of the overnight bag. The Chinese student reached up suddenly, long and hard, stretching his thin arms. Truda felt her own tension flee. So he was alive then, not just an image imposed on a window. Other windows in the apartment block were lit up now, but there were still many dark ones as well. Vacant? She wondered if she’d been in too much of a rush. She should have inquired about vacancies across the street. She had nothing in writing, just the voice telling her where the keys were, in the rafters of the garage, and where to mail post-dated cheques. Always get everything in writing. Dumb, dumb. The breeze lifted once again, and the metal ring on the window shade tapped sharply against glass. A sudden grating sound of metal against cement jarred and the comfortable heaviness fled. Jolted upright, Truda clutched the arms of the chair and listened. The sound came from the back of the house. Heart thudding, she watched as the Chinese student reached for another book and began to turn its pages. The couple leaned into each other, the woman’s quiet laughter, low and harsh, aggravated. Truda forced herself to get up. She walked to the door. The couple touched glasses and the ice rattled sharply.

  As Truda entered the living room, a string trailed across her neck and she slapped out at it. All through the house strings were attached to light chains, to sticks, and tied to drawers and cupboard doors in the kitchen, in both of the bedrooms. Beneath her feet, she felt the indentation in the broadloom, the wheelchair tire marks. She followed the marks through the long narrow room into the kitchen. She crossed over to the window, about to pull the shade, but the sight of a dime-sized circle of streetlight resting on the kitchen table stopped her. A hole in the blind. She sat down on the chair beside the window. The hole was eye-level. A peephole? She imagined someone brittle and thin, a bag of dried chicken bones in a heap of rumpled clothing, as hunched and bitter as the smell in the house, leaning towards the window. Damp air streamed up from the basement doorway, fern fronds uncurled wetly against her neck. She put her eye to the hole. Outside in the yard, illuminated by the blue glare of the streetlamp, two children bent over a garbage can. She watched. Were they the same ones she’d seen earlier during her walk beneath the arch of trees? Deliberately and silently, they up-ended the garbage can and shook its contents across the grass.

  The blind flapped noisily at the top of the window. That’s it, she told herself as she watched the children flee. That’s it, she said as she marched through the house, pulled strings and rolled up identical peep-holes. From the houses on both sides, blocks of light were flung down into the long narrow room. Somewhere a baby cried and water ran into a bathtub. That’s it, she said, not knowing what she meant, just that some action was necessary now, some vague resolution to keep from going backwards. To keep from calling Brian. She strode into
the veranda. The couple next door had gone into the house. The Chinese student was still hunched over his work, his chin cupped in the palm of his hand. She gathered up several newspapers, carried them into the front bedroom and spread them out over the mattress. She chose the room because there were no grooves in the carpet and the window faced the apartment block. She stripped free her A-line dress, her Banker’s Wife uniform. She peeled down her girdle, felt the sudden release of pressure. As she stepped free from it, her fingers automatically searched for the indentation marks the girdle pressed into her white flesh, the crisscross angry lines that took forever to fade. She had the map of the world in stretch marks on her stomach, her buttocks. But she hadn’t earned them the usual way, the accepted way. She searched through the overnight bag and found her nightgown. It fell in graceful, generous folds around her body. It had never failed her yet, the bag. Wherever she had gone with Brian, to Mexico, to Hawaii, she took along a change of underwear in it, her cosmetics and the pill. (The pill she had left behind this time because she was repulsed by her menstrual odour, that unnatural chemical smell.) And she had not been caught in a bind when her bags had been delayed or lost as her boxes were, somewhere in a dark corner of a shipping depot.

  She lay down on the narrow cot, the newspaper crackling sharply, causing her heartbeat to rise. She closed her eyes. Why had she continued to take the pill? she wondered. Habit. No more tampons. She anticipated the thick heavy flow, warm against her body. At better times, lying beside Brian in their queen-sized bed, she hadn’t been able to sleep this easily, she thought. It was amazing, she could actually feel herself drifting towards tomorrow while still connected with the night and the city, its threads of sounds winding and unwinding gently about her fingers. The baby crying, why was the baby crying? she wondered.