by David Bergen
And then Roy came home one day and flashed two tickets for a trip to Hawaii. They would leave in three days. He had arranged care for the children. Everything was set. Hope was surprised and upset, but she did not show it. She packed the suitcases and laid out a week of clean clothes for each child. She wrote a long note to Mrs. Tiessen, who was to take care of the children. She said, “Don’t force-feed peas to Penny. She detests them. And Conner is allowed to ride his bike to the end of the block, but no farther. Judith will want to have Angela over for a sleepover. She may, but one night only, and her door must stay open.” She erased the bit about the door. She taped the note to the fridge. She baked a tuna casserole and froze it. Emily called and Hope told her that she and Roy were going to Hawaii for a week and Emily said that was a very bourgeois thing to do. Hope didn’t quite know what this meant, but she assumed it was a criticism of sorts. She said, “I didn’t want to go, but Roy needs a holiday. He works so hard.”
She had forgotten what it felt like to be alone. At the hotel on Waikiki, during the day when Roy golfed, she lounged by the pool and read, and then she lay down in her room, on the large bed, and she heard the surf falling onto the beach below. The first few days she kept thinking that she heard a child calling, but it turned out to be a seagull or the honk of a vehicle. She and Roy ate dinner late, often in the hotel restaurant, which bordered the beach. He talked about his golf game and she talked about the book she had been reading or the conversations she ‘d had with the maids or the bellhop. She said that the humidity was good for her feet. She had had a pedicure that afternoon. She was wearing sandals with high heels and she lifted one of her feet slightly to let Roy have a peek. She took his hand and said, “This is wonderful. Thank you.” They shared a bottle of wine, though Hope drank most of it. She felt so free, so comfortable. She laughed at Roy, who was flirting harmlessly with the waitress. He was very handsome. That night she became pregnant with her fourth child, Melanie. She was slightly drunk, terribly content, hasty in making love, and careless.
Two months later, when her doctor told her that she was pregnant, Hope looked at him and said, “But I can’t,” and she began to cry. Doctor Krahn became flustered. He stood and sorted through his effects on his desk, and when she had wiped her tears, he asked if there was something wrong. Was she worried? She shook her head and waved him away. “I’m sorry. These days the tears just come out of nowhere.” That evening she waited until Roy had eaten and was drinking his coffee, and only then did she look at him and say, “I went to see Doctor Krahn today. It turns out that I’m pregnant again.” She had thought he might be distressed or upset, but then she often made that mistake, assumed they would share the same feelings. Roy raised his eyes and tilted his head. He got up from his chair and came around to her side of the table and kissed her cheek and hugged her. “That’s wonderful news.”
“How do you do that?” she asked.
“Do what, Hope?”
“How can you be so happy? Aren’t you worried?”
The children had finished eating and were watching television in the next room. They were free to talk. He laughed. “Look at all the space we have. The children will love having a baby brother or sister. The more the merrier.”
This was true. And yet, another little body terrified her.
“Sometimes it feels like so much. Have you noticed Judith’s teeth? The gaps? She’ll need her teeth straightened. Penny’s an outright mystery. I can’t make meaning of her. And Conner’s been wild and unruly. The other day he got into a fight at school. Mr. Rempel called. I tried to spank Conner when he got home and he just laughed at me. I should have used a wooden spoon. I told him that his father would take care of it. He looked at me and said that you would never spank him. You told him never to back down from a fight. Is that true, Roy?”
“Why are you telling this to me now? I should have known the day it happened. I can’t punish Conner now.”
“So he was right. You’re afraid of him.”
“Hope, come.” He took her chin and looked into her eyes. “Everything will be fine. What a delight, to have another child. Perhaps a boy.”
“Yes, and then we’ll have two boys who are boxers.”
She hung on to that notion of Roy being afraid of his son. It might be true. He indulged the child, seemed to think that the sun rose and set on his head. If this continued the boy would become a rebel and ne ‘er-do-well. In the kitchen later, cleaning the dishes, she began to cry quietly. The dread hovering about her shoulders was forceful and strong.
What also worried her was her own body, and the fact that she was larger now than when she had first married Roy, and that with each subsequent child her stomach had stretched. Now she didn’t look quite as good in her bathing suit. She didn’t want to talk to Roy about this, because it would be like throwing a problem down in front of him that he might not even have been aware of. So she left it alone and sometimes studied herself in the mirror, and she discovered that if she focused on her legs, which were long and holding their great shape, she could imagine that she was still young, and that Roy wouldn’t have to look elsewhere.
She called her mother, as she did at eight o’clock every evening, not because she wanted to but because it was her duty. You see, she could have told Roy, the children so consume me that I can’t even talk to my mother or have her in for dinner or simply be there as a daughter. Not that her mother had any expectations. She was retired now and often dropped in to help with the children, though when Hope saw her crossing the backyard and approaching the house, the weight of another body to talk to and feed and care for overwhelmed her.
On the phone now, she said, “I’m pregnant, Mom.”
“Oh, Hope. That’s wonderful. Isn’t it? Are you happy?”
“I’ve been too worried, Mom.”
“About what, Hope?”
“Everything. About my plants, that they will die. I worry about the kids. I hoard cans of food for the apocalypse. I worry that Roy will be unhappy with me. I worry that I worry too much.”
“Oh, Hope. I’m sorry. Do you have someone to talk to?”
“You mean friends? I talk to Emily.”
“I mean a doctor, someone who won’t let you make excuses. Someone who’s objective.”
“I can’t talk to Doctor Krahn about this.”
“There are pills that can help. But first you should talk to someone. How are the children?”
“Judith wants to visit you Friday night, as usual. Conner is going to a birthday party Saturday. Penny is her usual silent self, slipping through the world. She waxed the kitchen floor yesterday. Just like that. I worry that she senses the craziness in the house.”
“She’s such a sweetie. They all are. Talk to Doctor Krahn, okay? Promise?”
“I will.”
But she didn’t. She had little faith in Doctor Krahn, who had helped her birth all her children, who would be there for the birth of this child, but who wasn’t terribly smart when it came to conversation. He seemed frightened, or perhaps a bit thick. Why would she talk to him?
Emily, when she learned of the pregnancy, thought Hope was mad and was digging herself in.
“What do you mean, ‘digging myself in’?” It was one thing to feel sorry for oneself and admit to the vast responsibilities in life, and it was another to have a best friend criticize and imply failure. “I like children. I’m a good mother. It’s just sometimes I get tired.”
“Well, sure you do. Four sets of diapers, all those nights getting up, four times you toilet train, four times you send them off to grade one, four times you teach them to ride a bike. By the time they’ve all left home, you’ll be four times worn out.”
Emily’s voice was shrill. Hope looked at her and wondered if she was jealous. She’d had only one child and she’d implied that she would never want another, but what if that wasn’t true? What if Paul was incapable, or Emily was incapable? That might make her more strident.
She often saw herself as benea
th Emily. Emily was smarter, she spoke French, she owned Great Books and had just read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, from which she read long passages out loud to Hope, and then paused and raised her head as if to say, See? Emily had an opinion on everything, and she was constantly talking about “running away” as if Eden were a curse from which she needed to escape. Roy, only once, wondered out loud if it was healthy to spend time with a woman who so hated the town she lived in. “Sometimes,” he said, “negative thoughts land in our lap and they sit there and we don’t know how to chase them away. Emily’s like that. She drops those thoughts in your lap, Hope. She’s full of dissatisfaction.”
Emily said now that she was taking a psychology course at the university once a week, Thursday evenings, and she was reading a book by Betty Friedan. It was very important. Hope thought that she had said, “Betty Friesen,” the woman who lived on Third Street, a woman their age, and she asked Emily if it was true that Betty Friesen had written a book. “I never imagined that she was a writer.”
“Come on, Hope. For goodness’ sake. Betty Friedan. She’s from New York. She says that women need to be emancipated. It’s brilliant.”
Though Hope didn’t believe herself trapped in any way, she resented the implication. So what if she hadn’t heard of Betty Friedan? Emily was still talking about her course and about the professor, a youngish man who wore a beret to class and who was American and lived with an American woman who was also a professor of psychology. “They aren’t married,” Emily said. “Just lovers.”
Hope wondered what “just lovers” meant, but she didn’t ask. She felt suddenly old and stupid. She didn’t know anything, and this was a depressing thought. On the other hand, she wondered if there wasn’t entirely too much thinking going on and not enough work. Work was good for the soul. Thinking sometimes just confused the heart. Leisure, as Roy said, was a luxury that shouldn’t be overindulged, and for once Hope agreed.
One day there was a knock at the door and when Hope opened it she discovered Harlin, the hitchhiker, standing there, and beside him a young woman.
Hope tilted her head, unsure why Harlin was visiting, and then she laughed and said, “Do you need a ride somewhere?”
“Just got one,” Harlin said. Then he said, “Joking,” and he pointed at a Studebaker sitting in the driveway. “Got my own ride now.” He waited.
“Well,” Hope said, “do you want to come in?” She was showing already and she saw the young woman studying her stomach, and in order to make everyone comfortable, she said, “I’m pregnant,” and she made a little curtsy right there on the green linoleum.
Conner walked in holding a toy gun and he pointed it at Harlin and shot him.
“Got me,” Harlin cried and he stumbled across the kitchen holding his chest. Conner thought this hilarious. So he shot him again and again, and with each bullet Harlin writhed and groaned.
Hope pulled Conner’s arm and said, “That’s enough, Conner. He’s dead.” She told him that these were friends from long ago.
“Eight years. Maybe more. This is Ella, my fiancée.”
Hope shook Ella’s hand. Ella nodded but didn’t say anything. Conner pulled his mother down to whisper in her ear.
“They’re dark.”
“Yes, they are,” she said.
“Why?”
“Off you go.” She pushed him towards the back door.
“See ya, buddy,” Harlin called out.
Hope didn’t recall him being so talkative and she said so. “Last time I saw you you said maybe three words. I did all the talking.”
“And your husband.”
“What do you mean?”
“He drove me all the way back to Kenora and he talked and talked. He talked about work and honesty, and he talked about everybody getting a kick at the can. And he offered me a job at his garage. I told him that I couldn’t live in a town that was all white.” He looked at Ella and then Hope and he grinned. “Still is white. I told Ella that there wasn’t a single Indian in this place. Or Chinese, or black man.”
She wasn’t sure what Harlin wanted. She didn’t like his take on the town, though he was absolutely right. She said, “So you want a job now? After all these years?”
“Hell, no. I’m a roofer in Kenora. No, me and Ella were passing by and I said you want to see a town in a time warp and she said yeah and so we took a detour. We went shopping, by the way, at your second-hand place. Lady there told us where your new house was. Ella’s looking for a wedding dress.”
Harlin stopped talking and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one and exhaled. Hope fetched a saucer and laid it before him. He waved the smoke away and said, “You’re looking good, Hope. I was nineteen back then, and I told Ella that you were quite a looker. It was very different, you inviting me in like that. I thought that you were either nuts, crazy, or didn’t care.”
“Oh, I care. Thank you very much. I trusted you.”
“That’s what I said to Ella.” He grinned.
Hope turned to Ella and said, “I’ve got a wedding dress. And we ‘re almost the same size, don’t you think? Except I’m bigger at the moment.” She stood and indicated that Ella should stand as well. She stepped towards Ella and faced her. They were eye to eye. “Pretty close, don’t you think?” She looked at Harlin.
He put out his cigarette and nodded. “Whaddid I tell ya, El? Isn’t she a wonder?”
“I’ll go upstairs and look. It’s in the cedar closet.”
She climbed to the second floor and passed by Penny, who was sitting on the stairs with her notebook and pen. “Are you eavesdropping again?” Hope said good-naturedly. Penny’s habit over the past year, since she had learned to read and write, was to listen in on adult conversations and take notes. Penny shrugged and closed her notebook. Hope found the dress in the back of the closet, covered in plastic, and she carried it back downstairs. On the stairs, Penny said, “You’re going to give it to them for free?”
“To borrow. That’s all. Don’t worry. Are you worried?”
Penny had a long face and a mouth like Roy’s, and whenever she was uncertain, her mouth went downwards in an unhappy way, like Roy’s, and it was doing that now.
“They’ll bring it back, sweetie,” Hope said. “What am I to do with it? It’s just sitting there, in a bag.”
She continued to the kitchen. She removed the plastic and held up the dress and said, “So?”
“It’s a beauty,” Harlin said.
“You could try it on,” she said, and she took Ella back up the stairs, past Penny, and closed her in the master bedroom. Ella came back downstairs wearing the dress, no shoes, and for a moment, when Hope saw the manner in which Ella’s long dark hair fell over the bone-coloured buttons at the back of the dress, she suffered a pang of regret. She said, “It fits you. Very nice.”
“Better than nice. Sexy,” Harlin said and he pulled Ella onto his lap.
Hope had the strange sense that Harlin had just pulled her onto his lap, this being her kitchen and that being her wedding dress. Even Ella seemed uncomfortable. She stood and brushed lightly at the front of the dress and asked Hope if she was sure.
“I’m sure,” she said, though she wasn’t sure at all. “Don’t bother cleaning it. I’ll get it dry-cleaned.”
Later, after Harlin and Ella were gone, Penny appeared and poured herself a glass of milk and then sat at the table and watched her mother prepare supper. Penny didn’t speak—she just watched. She was empty-handed, her notebook was upstairs. Sometimes, Penny made Hope nervous with her silences and long gazes and this was one of those times. She looked at her daughter and then went back to her work and finally Penny spoke.
She said, “What will Daddy say?”
“About what?”
“The wedding dress. That you gave it away?”
“I didn’t give it away. I loaned it to them. They were in need. Daddy will understand.”
Penny got up and wandered into the living room. Then the side door opened and
closed and from the kitchen window Hope saw Penny in the backyard, on the swing, and Conner was aiming his pistol at her and shooting her. Penny kept swinging and Conner kept shooting.
At supper, which was roast chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy and corn from a can, she came right out and said that Harlin and his fiancée had visited and she’d given them her wedding dress. “You remember Harlin, don’t you?” she asked Roy.
He looked at her and said that he did. “I thought you were saving the dress for the girls. For Judith.”
“For me?” Judith asked. “I’m never getting married.”
Hope wondered where such disdain for marriage came from. What did she see in her parents’ world that made her talk this way? Perhaps she had been unduly influenced by Angela and Emily.
“Never say never,” Hope said.
“You just did,” Penny said.
“Did what?”
“Said ‘never.’ Never say never. You said it.”
“It’s a saying. It’s meant to be ironic.”
“What if they don’t bring the dress back?” This was Conner. He was studying the piece of chicken on his plate, picking at it, moving it from side to side.
“Well, then, that means they needed it more than I did.” She looked at her eldest daughter. “And Judith, should she get married someday, will have to get herself a new dress.” She smiled, as if in cahoots with Judith, but Judith didn’t smile back.
“What’s ‘ironic’?” Penny asked.
“Daddy will tell you,” Hope said. “I’m tired.” She got up and walked up the stairs and removed her clothes and climbed under the covers. She lay there with her eyes open, listening to the movements and mumblings of the family downstairs. It wasn’t fair just to throw everything onto Roy’s lap—he was tired too—but she wasn’t able to keep her shoulders square anymore. She slept, and when she woke Roy was snoring beside her. She got up and walked to her children’s rooms and found them all safe in bed and sleeping. Conner had thrown off his covers, and his left foot had tumbled off the bed and was dragging on the floor. She tucked him back in and kissed his damp forehead. He smelled of soap and talcum powder, and she realized that Roy had bathed him, or Conner had bathed himself, before bedtime. She imagined that if she should die, the children would be fine. They would eat and dress themselves and go to school and fight and come home and shampoo their hair and Roy would perhaps hire a woman to come in and wash the clothes and the floors and make meals and the woman would be young and pretty and efficient, with a flat stomach and a perfect body, and Roy, gullible and flirtatious, would fall in love with the woman and marry her and the kids would adore the new wife. Everyone might be happier if Hope weren’t around. But then who would understand Conner’s obstreperousness, or Judith’s eccentricities, such as her desire never to marry, or Penny’s dark and brooding silences, her piercing and all-knowing eye. Some strange new wife could never guess at these oddities. No, Hope would have to raise the children.