by David Bergen
She felt the silence and, trying to be civil, said, “My husband, Roy, he doesn’t like me to drive in the rain.”
The boy said that he would be glad to drive. “I’ve not driven such a beauty before.” He looked around and patted the seat between them.
“Oh, no, Roy wouldn’t want me to give the wheel over to you. Not because it’s you, but he would be against me giving it to anyone. He owns a Chevrolet dealership. Well, he and his father own it. He plans to buy it someday. He takes his cars quite seriously.”
The boy wasn’t talking, and this made her nervous. She said, as if to solidify her position, “We were married nine months ago and plan to have a number of children. Actually, we ‘re planning on building a new home.”
The boy opened the passenger window a crack and threw out his cigarette. He settled back in the seat. He seemed to be thinking, but he wasn’t speaking.
“I have family in Kenora,” she said. “Uncle Ernie works at the sawmill, and Uncle Stan is a fisherman. You might know them.”
“Doubt it,” the boy said.
His answers to her questions were brief and almost harsh. Though she wasn’t frightened. She said, “You could come for supper if you like. I’m making a noodle dish and there will be more than enough. Roy wouldn’t mind. And then, after, we could drive you back to the highway. Are you in a rush?”
“Not going anywhere fast,” he said.
She believed this meant he was willing, and she took the turnoff to Eden and they drove the remaining ten miles in silence. The rain had halted and to the south the sun had appeared. As she turned up the street to the house and pulled into the driveway she experienced a failure of will. She had never been in the house alone with a man other than Roy, and she thought now that she had perhaps chosen badly. She brushed these doubts aside and told him to come in. At the door, before they entered, she said, “My name’s Hope.” She held out her hand. He looked at it and grinned and shook her hand and said, “Harlin.”
She had him take off his boots and sit at the kitchen table so that in this way she could keep an eye on him as she cooked. She didn’t mistrust him, but he seemed nervous, taking off his cap and putting it back on and then off again, twisting it in his hands. He wanted to smoke again and she fetched him a saucer, as neither she nor Roy smoked, and she laid it in front of him. He said that he’d never been here before, in this town, though he’d passed the sign numerous times out on the highway. He said that maybe her husband was hiring. He knew something about motors, as he worked on outboards and such.
“Well, that’s a thought,” she said. “One of my cousins, Ian Macintyre, can tear down an outboard and put it back together in an hour. He lives near the marina in Kenora. You might know him.”
He shook his head.
“He’s a redhead. Can’t miss him. He married Candace Shand. Her family owns the movie theatre.” She scooped elbow macaroni into the boiling water. Stirred it. Watched it come to a boil again. She felt uncertain, though she wasn’t sure why. Harlin was just sitting and smoking and he wasn’t even looking at her in any way that felt awkward, though when she had her back to him she was aware of her calves and the Band-Aid on her Achilles tendon. She’d put it there in the morning because the back of her shoe, the right one, was chafing and creating a blister. She wondered if the Band-Aid itself made her appear vulnerable.
She asked Harlin if he wanted to watch television. They had recently purchased one.
He nodded. But he didn’t move, or indicate any desire to see the set. He crossed his right leg over his left thigh and rested a hand on his ankle. She went to wash and clean up her hair and change, and when she came back down he was still sitting as before. She was wearing a beige short-sleeved dress with a high neckline and light hose and tan pumps. She had pulled her hair up. She usually dressed up for dinner with Roy.
When Roy came home at six, she heard his car pull up in the driveway and she met him at the door. She took his suit jacket and kissed him on the cheek and said, “We have a guest for dinner.” If he was surprised, he did not show it. The three of them ate quietly. Roy asked Harlin various questions. Had he finished school? He hadn’t. Was he working? He wasn’t, though he might fish with his father through the summer.
“I told him that Uncle Stan was a fisherman,” she said.
Roy talked about his day, about the new 1951 Fleetline Deluxe. “The chrome is splendid. A V8. People have been asking for it.” He gave the list price, but Hope didn’t quite hear it. She was thinking that she had made a mistake.
She kept thinking about this through the cleanup of the dishes, which she was doing alone. Roy had driven Harlin up to the Trans-Canada. There had been no discussion of Hope going along. Roy had simply folded his napkin and moved his chair back from the table and said to Harlin that it was time to go.
She scrubbed the Dutch oven, removing the stuck-on noodles. When she drained the sink there was a large amount of soggy noodles in the drain and she removed these and put them in the garbage. She thought it would be nice to get a dog, though Roy disliked domestic animals. Still, the one time they had discussed the possibility, he did say that he preferred dogs to cats.
She sat in the growing darkness of the living room. At eight she called her mother, who answered on the first ring. She told her about the hitchhiker and about where he had come from. The fact that he was an Indian did not come up, though her mother would have been interested. After her conversation with her mother, Hope read for an hour. She had planned to stay up until Roy returned, but it got to be eleven and she grew tired and so she went to bed, waking at 1 a.m. to discover that Roy was still not home. She panicked for a moment and then decided that he had gone to the office. He did that sometimes, working very late.
He returned early in the morning. She woke and held him and smelled the car on him and a hint of the boy as well. She said, “Thank you.” And he fell asleep. At the breakfast table he said that he had driven the boy all the way to Kenora. “I couldn’t leave him out on the highway.” He drank some coffee, put down the cup, and looked at her. “Don’t pick up any more hitchhikers. It’s too dangerous.”
She said, “Did he attack you? Did he attack me or rob you?” She moved her hand from here to there and back again. “We ‘re sitting here, eating breakfast. Nothing happened. Though it might have added some spice to my life if something had happened.”
He grimaced. She knew that look. He said, “If you want spice, join the sewing circle. They have lots of work. Making clothes for the poor in Africa.”
“I’m not interested in Africa. I had the chance to go to Africa. Arnold Dick wanted to marry me and take me to Africa. I could have married him, but I said no. Africa holds no interest for me.” She had raised her voice and it shook and she felt the heat in her face. “Is it because he was an Indian?”
She could see that he disliked this accusation. He saw himself as fair-minded and civil, and to be accused of racism, which is what she was doing, hurt him. He did not answer. This was their first fight. They had been married almost a year and finally they were fighting. She had always wondered when they would fight, what would set her husband off, and she saw now that it was she herself who had needed to be set off. She wondered if this meant that she was too easy, too acquiescent, that perhaps she needed to be more headstrong. She stood and poured him more coffee. She said that she would not pick up any more hitchhikers. She was standing behind him and she placed her hands on his shoulders and smoothed his shirt and kissed the top of his head.
The following week she sped right by an older man who was hitchhiking. Two weeks later she drove by a man and a woman and a child standing in the pouring rain. Imagine that, a poor child who might catch pneumonia and ultimately die, all because Roy, stubborn man, was trying to protect his innocent wife. She decided that it was time to have a baby.
It took Hope several years to get pregnant, years that were full of doubt and anguish. She resigned herself to a life of barrenness, like Abraham’s Sarah
, and she cast about for various opinions on adoption. Roy, full of equanimity and calm, never complained or seemed worried. Instead, he built a house for his wife. It was a two-storey, in a new development close to the hospital, and it boasted everything modern and of the day: bathrooms upstairs and down, a grand master bedroom on the main floor with walk-in closets, three more bedrooms on the second floor for the children, a custom-designed kitchen with hand-built cherry cabinets and Floform countertops and two sinks, laundry on the main floor off the kitchen, a dining room that held ten easily, and a two-car attached garage that was fully insulated. She loved the house, but she wanted something more than furniture to put in it and when she finally became pregnant with her daughter Judith, in 1953, she began to relax and on winter afternoons she sat by the fireplace in the living room and looked out at the expanse of snow and caught glimpses of wild rabbits scampering across the front yard.
She did not breastfeed Judith. It was neither encouraged nor promoted. She had talked to other young mothers in town, at church, and at social evenings with the wives of Roy’s compatriots, and no one was breastfeeding. This was a fact. Two years later Conner was born and Hope saw immediately that her two children, girl and boy, were completely different. Conner was an explorer. As soon as he was able to crawl he disappeared. She found him once in the neighbour’s backyard, a block away. He had pushed the screen door open, edged down the back stairs and made it across their lawn and past the Nikkels’ and the Tiessens’, through the Friesens’ tomato patch, and had come to rest by Mrs. Heinrich’s tabby, who was lying near the begonias in her backyard. When Hope found him she kneeled in the grass and then lay down and saw the cat and the grass as Conner would see them. Conner thought that this was a game, and he climbed onto her head and clutched her ears as if he were a very tiny bull rider.
Judith, on the other hand, never strayed. She always looked to her mother for guidance and confidence and surety. When she began to speak she always said “Can I?” to her mother before acting. Years later, Hope would think that this was why she never married—because her mother hadn’t given her the green light. The third child, born in 1957, was another girl. She was named Penny. Hope noticed immediately that Penny needed little attention. She rarely cried, ate when fed, slept copiously, and stared at Hope with an intense gaze that was disconcerting. Hope would bend over her and touch her nose and ask, “Who you lookin’ at? Hey? Who do you love?” But this elicited no fondness, no cooing, no smile. The girl’s face was serious. Hope wondered if the child was able to see some dark flaw in her mother that no one else had yet discovered. She took to talking with Penny from a distance. Without eye contact. Fearing a response. Not that Penny was difficult. She just seemed prescient, and old for her age.
Alone with three children all day, she had no idea if she was a good mother. Her own mother had had only one child, and in fact her father had taken care of her when her mother was at school, teaching. She recalled her father sitting in a chair, smoking, telling her stories, sometimes nodding off, or standing at the kitchen counter rolling out pastries on his mammoth bread board. She remembered helping him make cinnamon buns and then eating them with coffee in the late afternoon. She had been allowed coffee as a child. One day, with her own children, she attempted to replicate that scenario. She pulled out the yeast and flour and cinnamon and rolling pin, plunked Penny in a high chair, called Judith and Conner, and together they set to work. Conner’s hands were everywhere, and he gobbled up the dough. Judith kept shushing Penny, whose fat little hands moved like pistons, demanding her own portion of dough. “Not too much, dear,” Hope told Judith. “She’ll choke.” They ate the warm buns in the dim light of a fall evening. Judith had insisted that they wait for Dad, and so they waited and waited, until they could wait no longer. Hope said that perhaps they should place a bun on a plate and set it by Roy’s place at the table and he could eat it when he got home. This is what Judith did, writing a note that said, “Dad, this is for you. We made it. Love, Judith, Conner, Penny.”
That night, when Roy finally arrived home at nine o’clock, Hope sat across from him and talked about her day. She talked about Penny falling and cutting her chin, though she wouldn’t require stitches, and she told him about making the cinnamon buns and how excited Judith had been to share one with him, and she talked about driving to Penner Foods for groceries and how difficult Conner could be—he was constantly running. “It’s a good thing everyone knows him. If we lived in a big city he might just disappear, he’s so elusive.” She thought about this and then said, “Not that I want him to disappear, it’s just he’s so much work sometimes. How about your day?”
He looked over at the kitchen. “Is there dinner?”
She looked at him and then looked over at the kitchen as well, and then her face crumpled and she began to cry. She covered her face with her hands and she cried for a good number of minutes so that Roy, bewildered, finally reached out a hand and said, “What? What did I say?”
She lifted her head. “That’s it. You’re eating dinner. It’s all the time I had. And then you were late, and Judith was disappointed that she couldn’t watch you eat the cinnamon bun that she had made with her own hands, and Conner wouldn’t go to bed properly, and Penny just sits there staring at me, and you don’t like my legs anymore.”
“What are you talking about? Of course I like your legs. What does that have to do with dinner, Hope?”
Earlier, after the children were in bed, she had bathed and shaved her legs and put on a yellow dress that hugged her hips and allowed some space for her stomach and hung just right, so that her legs, the best feature on her body, were exposed very nicely. Her legs were her pride and joy. She was aware of the extensor muscles on her calves, which were unusual and very defined.
“I was the fastest runner in high school, Roy. And I got the gold medal for highest marks at graduation. Don’t forget that.”
“Sure you did. I didn’t forget.”
“But you do forget. You leave me early in the morning and then return late at night, and you trust that I will still be here. Well, here I am. Your ugly and forlorn wife.”
“Don’t be melodramatic, Hope. You’re tired.”
“I’m not. I’m lonely.”
He rose and sighed and came around the table and placed his hands on her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. “Don’t be silly. You have three beautiful children.”
“Am I? Silly?”
“Yes. Silly Hope.”
“I could fry you some eggs. And there are a few potatoes in the fridge. I could fry those as well.” She placed her hands on her lap, calmer now. Leaned her head back against Roy’s stomach and looked up at his chin. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry. I ate something at the diner. Come.” And he pulled her to her feet and held her.
In the morning, when Judith came down for breakfast, there was a note waiting on the table. “Dear Judy. Thank you for the cinnamon bun. Good work. Dad.”
She knew that Roy’s days were difficult. He worked hard. He was gone from seven in the morning until six at night. And sometimes he went out to meetings in the evenings: the Chamber of Commerce, prayer meeting, town council. He usually did not sleep through the night, and sometimes she would wake and discover his absence and would get up and find him in the living room, drinking juice and reading a magazine or a crime novel. “Are you okay, Roy?” she ‘d ask, and he would look up and smile and say that of course he was fine. He said that he would come back to bed shortly. They made love at those times, when he returned to bed. The house was quiet, the night bottomless. After, he slept deeply and she lay awake and listened for danger. She wondered if any other married couple had made love at 3 a.m. in Eden, Manitoba, on June 14, 1959. She smiled at the thought.
In 1960 her father died of lung cancer. At the funeral Hope sat with her mother and held Penny on her lap. Judith sat between them. Roy was on the men’s side with his father and brother. Conner, sitting on his lap, kept trying to escape
. During the hymn “In the Sweet By and By” she saw Conner flash by, legs pumping, and then Roy was out of his pew, his arms hung low and his shoulders bent as if to diminish himself in some way, and for the first time Hope noticed that her husband resembled a monkey. His arms were very long and he was stooped and his forehead was small. This made her nervous and she felt sweat drip from her armpits. She didn’t want to ruin her dress and so she held her arms out from her body slightly and told herself to breathe slowly. Penny, in her lap, had worked one of her shoes free and dropped it on the floor and then leaned forward to discover into which particular abyss it had fallen. She giggled. Hope shushed her. Judith bent down and picked up the shoe and slipped it back on Penny’s foot. She retied the lace and looked up at Hope when she was finished. “Thank you,” Hope mouthed.
Penny untied her shoe and dropped it. Judith picked it up. The girls giggled. And so the game went on. Finally, Hope told Judith to take Penny into the back, by the boot rack. “Not outside, okay?” After the girls were gone, Hope slid over close to her mother and took her hand and held it, and in doing so she felt for the first time the sadness of her father’s death. She was aware that she had loved him from a distance. And he her. Her mother did not radiate sadness, but then she never had. She remained eternally optimistic and was always more curious than spiteful. She liked Roy. She thought that he was strong and kind and she liked that he didn’t drink. He had money, something Hope’s mother had always struggled to achieve, and so Hope was fortunate. An only child who had found her way in the world.