by David Bergen
The mother hit him with an open hand across the face. “Shut your mouth,” she said.
The boy looked at Hope, his face full of shame and hatred, so much so that Hope could not hold his eyes. Roy had seen the slap and heard the words but he said nothing. He beckoned, indicating that she should climb into the tow truck, and then they were off, wending their way up the narrow drive, past sway-backed granaries. Hope turned to look back and she saw the mother leaning forward and holding the older son by the shoulders and she was talking and then her hands were in the air. Roy said, “Acch. I never should have sold them the truck.”
“That’s right. Why did you? Did you see that boy?”
“I saw him. He’s growing up way too fast.”
It was an odd thing to hear and she wondered if Roy’s heart wasn’t bigger than he let on. Not that he was full of bravado and male bluster. He wasn’t. He could be surprisingly soft.
The thing was—she would realize this only much later, after she had spent numerous weekends with Roy, him picking her up when she was free from her training so that they would spend the day together driving about, sharing thoughtful intimacies, talking about what they wanted in life, driving out to Lockport for a hot dog—the thing was he never smelled of alcohol. She knew the smell from her father. A sweetish bitter scent, sometimes minty, often sour, caught not so much when the subject breathed but more so as he passed by, as if the pores emitted the secrets of a closet drinker. Not Roy. Ever. When she asked him about it, he said that he wasn’t against drinking, he just didn’t have the taste for it.
She started to yearn for his company. Her thoughts turned constantly to him and she began to make mistakes on the ward, errors that were not life-threatening to the patients, but little mistakes that accumulated. Sister Andrea cornered her one afternoon and, wagging her finger, asked, “Is it a man, Hope Plett? Every year one or two girls think they are extremely special, the only ones to have ever experienced love, and so they blindly run off following their animal instincts. You are a nurse, not a trollop. What do you want?”
Indeed, what did she want? She told Roy that she would not see him for a while. She needed to focus on her studies.
“You’re breaking up with me?” Roy asked.
“Oh, no. No.” She paused. “If you could wait. Give me some time.”
“How much time?”
She was almost halfway through the first year of a two-year program and she couldn’t imagine that he would wait eighteen months.
“Till Christmas. I’ll have a two-week break then. I’ll be home. Sister Andrea hates me. I have to make her at least respect me.” She imagined that if he loved her, he would say yes. She did not know yet if she loved him.
“Sister Andrea, the prune?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. But at Christmas, I want you to meet my family.”
She went up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. They were standing outside the residence in St. Boniface. The wind was cold, the sky promised snow, and even so, his face was warm. “I’ll write you a letter every day.”
Over the coming weeks, she ached to see him, to talk to him in person, but she ignored her feelings and focused on being a good nurse, studying late into the night and then pouring her thoughts into the letters she wrote him, aware that the written word allowed her to be more audacious. The first time she wrote the words “I love you, Roy,” she stared at them and for a time considered ripping up the letter and starting again, but then she added “I do” to the end of the sentence and she folded the letter and sealed it. Mailed it the next day. Roy did not write as eloquently as she did and she waited for his own declaration back. He did not write those words, however. Instead, in the rare letter she received, he spoke of his work and the cars he had sold and the new models that would be arriving in the showroom in spring. The Styleline Deluxe convertible had leather seats and Powerglide transmission. The top opened and closed automatically. “It’s a beauty,” he wrote. “At Christmas I’ll give you a ride. Top up, of course.” She was disappointed that he couldn’t come out and say that he loved her, or even that he missed her.
And then one morning Petra announced that she had got married over the weekend. She reached into her purse and took out a ring, put it on, and showed it off.
“But how?” Hope said.
“Oh, Hope, you’re hopeless. It’s so easy.” Petra’s black eyes appeared to hold a vision of the future that was limitless. “I’m quitting. At Christmas. Aldo has a good job as a plumber’s apprentice, he just bought a house, and I’m thinking there’s no way he’ll wait for me. He’s too good a catch.”
“But if he loves you, why wouldn’t he wait?”
“Now he doesn’t have to wait, does he?”
“Aren’t you worried? That you might be throwing something away? Or about what people will say?”
Petra wasn’t at all worried, and Hope wished that she had some of her roommate’s nerve, her devil-may-care attitude.
Hope wrote Roy to tell him that her roommate had suddenly got married. “She was worried that he wouldn’t wait for her. Impetuous, wouldn’t you say? And not very trusting.” Still, she wondered if there might be girls in Eden who were making Roy all knock-kneed and weak. She wanted to say, “Please tell me that this isn’t so,” but she didn’t, because that would appear to be desperate. Instead, she wrote that on Sunday mornings, at 6 a.m., when she woke, she stood by her window, which looked out onto the street, and had happy memories of seeing his car idling at the curb. “I wonder if what I want and what I expect from life are the same thing. Sometimes at night I wake from a deep sleep and all is dark. And I am aware of being alone. I mean this in the strongest way. Even when we are surrounded by others and there is laughter and food and conversation, do we let others know who we are? Oh my, you will probably find my thoughts alarming. I am fine. I am working hard. I look forward to Christmas.”
Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, after washing a few clothes by hand and ironing her uniform, she would walk across the river from St. Boniface into downtown Winnipeg to Eaton’s and the Bay, where she would wander through the women’s clothing departments and admire the clothes and the shoes on display. She loved to touch the expensive cloth of a certain dress, holding it up in front of her as she gazed into a mirror. There were times when she imagined that she might have enough money to buy this dress or those shoes, black with tan piping. She had her eye on a coral silk taffeta dress. The price was impractical but she kept coming back to stare at and touch it, and one day, just because, she tried it on. The sleeves were short and flouncy and the neckline plunged slightly, but not too much. A small bow centred the navel. The hem came just below the knee and set off her bared calves. She stepped out of the change room and studied herself. The shopgirl was behind her.
“It’s perfect,” the shopgirl said.
Hope, turning sideways to observe her profile, said, “I look flat.”
“No, no. You can carry it off, no problem. I have just the thing.” And she hurried off and returned with a Maidenform bra and told Hope to try it on. “You’ll be amazed at the difference.”
Hope loved the effect, but wondered if she might not be fooling herself, and especially Roy. She blew up her cheeks and tossed her head. She truly didn’t recognize herself, and for some reason this pleased her.
The following Saturday her cousin Frida drove in from Altona and met her at the Bay. Hope tried on the dress for her.
“Fine, very fine,” Frida said in Low German. She whistled. “Your breasts are bigger.”
Hope giggled. “I know.”
Hope had told Frida about Roy, and that she was going to meet his family at Christmas.
Frida said now, “If I had your looks? Man alive, I’d marry you.”
“Oh, stop it.” Hope showed Frida the price tag. She shrugged and returned to the dressing room.
A week later a box was delivered to her room at the residence. In it was the dress and the bra. A note in the package read, “Me
rry Christmas, Hope. Knock him out.”
She called Frida immediately. “You can’t afford this, Frida,” she said. “I’m going to return it.”
“You’ll do no such thing. Anyway, you can’t return a gift.”
“But, Frida, it’s far too generous. What will I buy for you?”
“When you marry Roy, get me a deal on a car.” She laughed in her way, with a little snort.
“It’s amazing, Frida. You’re amazing.”
“Yeah, amazing Frida.”
On Boxing Day, she went for turkey dinner at Roy’s house. She wore the dress and pulled her hair up, allowing several tendrils to tumble as if at random. She clipped on a pair of her mother’s pearl earrings and painted her lips a soft rose, to blend in with the dress. Her gloves, off-white, extended to her elbows. When Roy saw her he tilted his head and said, “Wow.” As he helped her into her well-worn car coat, his hands brushed her arms and shoulders. He whispered, “You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she said. She carried with her a box of chocolate mints that had cost a fair bit. When she handed them to Mrs. Koop, there seemed to be little recognition of the gift. The box was placed on a side table in the hallway and forgotten. Mrs. Koop was pleasantly cool until Hope, at the dinner table, spoke a few words of Low German, and Roy’s mother lifted her head in surprise. Roy’s father, Ernest Koop, bald and garrulous, sat at the head of the table. She had heard about him. He came from a family of six brothers who were constantly in competition. They all owned businesses of some sort. They were rowdy, aggressive, and growing up there had been fisticuffs and general mayhem in the house. Their mother, now dead, had suffered her six sons mostly in silence, with the occasional futile outburst.
Harold, Roy’s older brother, was present at the table. He had, during the war, going against the beliefs of most of the young Mennonite men in Eden who were conscientious objectors, been based in India for three years as a tail gunner, and then he had come home and begun to work in the parts department at the dealership. He never talked about himself and certainly didn’t mention the war years. He didn’t have the quiet confident salesmanship that Roy had. There was a sister as well, Berta. She was a year younger than Roy, but she seemed older. Dour and matronly, dressed in a dull grey dress that hid her femininity, she resembled her mother. They were two fierce women standing guard at the doorway to Roy’s heart.
Mr. Koop, helping himself to more turkey and bubbat, a raisin-filled heavy dressing, mentioned Hope’s mother. “Harold had her as a teacher. Didn’t you, Harold?”
Harold nodded.
Mr. Koop said, “Very sophisticated, your mother. Every time I talk to her, I imagine that we will suddenly be speaking the King’s English, or that I will be tested on Shakespeare. She wears hats, always a different shape and colour.”
Berta looked at her father, sharply, as if surprised by something.
“Do you think the same of me? That I will test you?” Hope realized that the question was quite forward, and that in asking it, she was setting herself apart from Berta and Mrs. Koop, but she didn’t care. She had caught on quickly that Roy was the favourite child, and that this gave her leverage, especially with Mr. Koop, who laughed and said, “Please don’t. I dropped out of school at the age of eleven.”
Berta said, “An education can puff people up. Like peacocks.”
“Berta. Get the bread.” This was Mrs. Koop, who was busy fetching food and replenishing the punch and generally huffing about, her dreary dress passing from here to there.
Hope wondered how often Mr. and Mrs. Koop were intimate. She pushed the thought away.
“Still, there’s nothing like college, is there?” Mr. Koop continued. “Roy went to Flint for two years.”
“That’s not the same,” Roy said.
“Yes it is,” Hope said. She touched his arm. She had been aware, throughout the meal, that he was beside her and yet quite far from her, and she wanted to claim him now. She left her hand on the sleeve of his shirt. “You studied physics and chemistry eleven hours a day. And accounting.”
“He got all A’s,” Berta said, back at the table, letting Hope know that her big brother was brainy.
“I know.” Hope smiled at Berta. “He’s a smart one.”
“Well, I’m happy that my boy’s marrying a nurse.” Roy’s father held a hand to his chest. “The Koop ticker is a weak one. Genetically unsound. We need you.”
She dipped her head and waited for Roy to clarify. But it was Mrs. Koop who said, “What are you going on about, Ernie? She’s just Roy’s friend. They have loads of time anyhow. Marriage tastes good, but it costs too.”
Later that night, when Roy dropped her off at home, she said, “Your mother doesn’t like chocolate.”
“Sure she does. She has a sweet tooth. So does Berta. They’re probably digging in right now.”
“They didn’t like me. They said almost nothing to me, and when they did, I was a peacock.”
“Oh, ignore Berta. She’s protective, like my mother.”
“And when we ‘re married, they’ll still want to protect you?” Having blurted this out, she could not take it back, though she wanted to immediately. This was so forward, so contrary to her careful behaviour, that she was mortified. “Oh my,” she said.
But Roy was neither surprised nor upset. “I like it when you talk like that.”
“It doesn’t frighten you?”
“Hah. Takes more than that.”
“It’s just not terribly romantic. I feel like everything is backwards. Like I’m the man.”
“Well. Would you?” he said. “Marry me?”
“Yes. I would. I will. Yes.”
And when we are married. Such a simple statement that opened up all sorts of doors and shut others. She must have wanted to say those words, must have wanted to hear them, to feel them in her mouth. As she explained to her mother the following day, Roy was established and she knew that she wanted to have children, and what would be the use in completing school, never to work at a nursing job?
“Well,” her mother said, “he could die, or he could leave you for someone else, and then what? You’d be poor once again.”
“He won’t leave me. He’s too good a man.”
“He’s good now, so you think. And you may be right.” She wasn’t given to directing her daughter’s life. “If this is what you want.”
Hope told Roy that she wanted to finish out the year, as if this would prove something both to herself and to him. “It wouldn’t feel right to run away. We can marry in the summer.”
He agreed, though not happily. This meant that they wouldn’t have sex until summer, and he was so looking forward to sex with Hope. She was a great kisser. They had first kissed that night after the dinner at his parents’, and with each kiss he wanted to burrow deeper, to tear the wrapping from her. But he knew that sex was for marriage, and so they would wait.
She worked that summer, before the wedding, as an operator at the telephone office in Eden, taking care of the switchboard. She wore earphones and overheard conversations she should not have been privy to, was in fact expected to turn off the connection, but there were times when a certain inflection in the voice or the sultry response of a woman made her hang on to the conversation a little longer than required. She discovered that Mrs. Cornie Dueck was an incredible gossip. And that Ed Wiens, who owned a chain of grocery stores throughout southern Manitoba, was probably having an affair with his secretary, Leona. Ed would often call her long distance when he was out of town. Hope would patch him through and hear Leona’s voice answer, and once, before she could turn him off, Ed said, “Sweetheart.” It quickened her breath and made her queasy as well. She didn’t like the power of that knowledge. Roy liked to call her as well. He’d dial “0” and when she answered, “Hello, operator,” he’d say, “I just wanted to hear your voice.” And they’d talk, sometimes at length, though she would have to keep cutting him off and then come back to him, and so their conversations were e
lliptical and disjointed. One night he phoned her and said that he was driving up to Fort Frances the following morning, just for the day. He had to deliver some parts. Would she like to come along?
She said she might. She had the day off, and she ‘d never been to Fort Frances before.
“We’ll take the American route, though it’s not much different. But at least you can say you visited Minnesota.”
Later, after the trip, she would realize that she had taken quite a risk in going along with Roy. What turned out to be a romantic two days might just as easily have dissolved their relationship if Roy had been a different man. But he wasn’t a different man—he was Roy. It was a hot day, late July, and certain crops had already ripened and so farmers were swathing the fields. As they drove she pointed out the farmyards, horses grazing, and the white clouds high in the sky. “They look like sheep,” she said. Roy took pleasure in her curiosity and in the attention she paid to little things and in the attention she paid to him. She held his hand. Touched his cheek. Adjusted his hat, took it off and placed it on her own head in a jaunty manner. They stopped for a chicken sandwich and mushroom soup in Baudette, on the American side. When the waitress, a very pretty girl who looked like Marilyn Monroe, delivered their food, she laid it out before them and then stood back and said, “You two wouldn’t be newlyweds, would you? It’s just you look like it.”