Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  Trevor liked the Spider-Man underwear Clara brought. And he couldn’t stop running his hands up and down his fleecy pants; it was beginning to bug Dolly. They were in line behind two other carts, and this was the shortest line.

  Pearce had woken up fretful, but Clara didn’t want to take him out of the seat if she’d have to put him back in screaming. Where was Mrs. Pell? She must be roaming around the store.

  “Can I have a doughnut?”

  Clara stared at Dolly for a minute before she could get her mind back to doughnuts.

  “The apple fritters, can I have one?”

  “Me too,” Trevor said. Pearce started to cry.

  “Oh, children, can’t you wait for ten minutes? We have to go through the cash.”

  “You could just tell her we ate two of them,” Dolly said.

  It was sensible enough. But her mouth formed to say no.

  “Please reconsider?” Trevor asked her.

  Pearce was squalling, Mrs. Pell was missing. She laughed anyway. “Okay, Trevor, I have reconsidered.”

  Done shopping, Mrs. Pell left her basket in the aisle. Her pockets were too full, cookies would make a bulge. Wait, cherries, she needed some of those. She picked up the bright bottle and shuffled toward the checkout, where that woman had set the baby crying again. Typical.

  The cart was already bumping up against the conveyor belt. Clara unloaded, shepherding the children through in front of her. She said no, no, not today, to gum, chocolate bars, and a picnic cookbook. She remembered to tell the cashier they’d eaten two fritters. It all mounted up, up, and Clara was shocked to see $127.62 on the window.

  She got out her bank card, but Mrs. Pell’s grimy fist came slap on the conveyor belt.

  “And these,” she said to the cashier, putting a large jar of maraschino cherries on the belt.

  “$134.43,” the cashier said, and Clara didn’t have the strength of character to say no, or even to protest—seven dollars for cherries!

  Bags in the cart, Pearce quieter, they processed out of the store, Mrs. Pell clanking gently with every step. One of the grocery managers followed them for a little while, trying to catch Clara’s eye.

  “Thank you, I don’t need help,” she said, smiling, recognizing him—Jeff Fisher from church. Her good humour was restored by kind service. “I’ve got lots of helpers today!”

  Mrs. Pell, too, gave him a big smile. Row after row of dirty teeth.

  9. A million billion trillion

  In the afternoon, just as Clara was thinking about going to see Lorraine, Clayton phoned. It never crossed Clara’s mind that it might be him—she expected her cousin Grace, calling to talk some sense into her.

  “It’s me,” Clayton said. She knew his voice immediately.

  There was a pause.

  “You didn’t think you’d hear from me.”

  She couldn’t speak.

  “How’re the kids?”

  Was he drunk? She had to answer. “They’re well,” she said, her stomach jumping, quick blood flooding her legs. She leaned against the kitchen counter. A week since he left—it seemed like a year.

  “What’s happening with Lorraine?”

  Trevor was going past the kitchen doorway. She didn’t want the children to hear. She said nothing for a moment.

  “I’ve got a right to know,” he said, louder.

  “Of course,” she said. “They’ve told us it’s non-Hodgkins lymphoma. They are going to start chemo on Monday, if they can keep her fever down. You could phone the hospital, they would tell you.” She didn’t want him phoning Lorraine, though.

  “I don’t have time for that. You tell me.”

  “Well, this kind of chemo is very strong, so she will stay in the hospital. If the chemo does what it’s supposed to do—I don’t really know what’s next. There are different kinds of bone marrow transplants…They’re worried, because she’s younger than most people who have non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but that means they’ll try harder for her.”

  “Yeah.” He was quiet for a minute.

  “That’s really all we know, we’re waiting for them to find out more.” Don’t let him phone Lorraine, she was praying, so Lorraine wouldn’t be worried that he was not with the children. Or so she wouldn’t find out that Clara had lied.

  Clara’s fingers were clammy on the receiver. She changed hands.

  “Okay, well, I got a line on a job. I’m moving around now, I needed the vehicle to get the work.”

  What could she say to that? “Yes,” she said. Whatever he would think she meant: yes, that’s fine, have my mother’s car…

  “Tell the kids I called.”

  She nodded, and then said “Yes,” again. She could hear traffic going by behind him.

  “I’ve been doing things for Lorraine, too,” he said. As if he had to justify himself to Clara. When she didn’t speak, he said loudly, “Fuck you.” He hung up.

  Dolly’s new pink running shoe flashed in at the back door, and Clara dodged backwards and fled down to the bathroom. She scrubbed at her hands, managing not to catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror. He hadn’t inquired after his mother, she noticed.

  She longed for bedtime. After the dishes she took the children to the park, hoping to tire them out, but they were alone in the playground and their own company was wearing thin. She jounced Pearce up and down to console him for not riding the merry-go-round, and cheered at their speed or prowess when requested. She had to find them some friends.

  Except that then Clayton would come and take them away, and all her work would be wasted, and then they’d have to miss the friends, as well as everything else.

  At home Clara tried to put the sleeping baby down, slow as a river of lava flowing into his basket, but he felt the change and woke, crying.

  Mrs. Pell jumped up from the TV to catch Clara at fault. She would have let Pearce cry, any other time. “You leave him with me,” she croaked, in a mixture of impatience and triumph. “He’ll behave for me, he needs his special soother.”

  Sure enough, the crying did not continue for long.

  After the children were in bed Clara went through the house turning off lights and checking the stove, trying to bring order and safety back into her house. By the time she had put away the toys and tidied up the bedtime snack and folded the clothes from the dryer she expected to fall asleep at once, but she lay wide awake, her mind playing ridiculous scenes of Trevor drowning in the bathtub, or Mrs. Pell poisoning the baby. Clayton stealing into the house, taking his children. After midnight she remembered: she had not gone to the hospital to see Lorraine. She cried, then, and had to go to the kitchen for Kleenex to blow her nose.

  Her life had been turned upside down and violently shaken, like the peaceful winter scene in a snowglobe, and she was some poor flake of snow twisting and hurtling in the demented storm. Imagine how Lorraine must feel, she told herself.

  At 6 a.m., too early for the hospital, she went out to pull weeds from the front beds for an hour. Mrs. Zenko came over from her garden to have a look at the John Cabot rose bush, and Clara remembered to ask if she had any perogies in her freezer.

  “I made cracked wheat buns for her last night,” Mrs. Zenko said. She cheered Clara up, joining in the caretaking work as if it was only natural. “Yes, perogies, oh my yes.”

  “Their father called yesterday,” Clara told her. “He scares me.”

  “He’s an angry fellow,” Mrs. Zenko said, without judgement. “Is he bringing back the car?” Clara had not mentioned the car, but of course Mrs. Zenko knew.

  “He said he needed a vehicle for getting work.”

  “Well, that would be good. He’s going to need something steady.”

  Clara found it hard to imagine Clayton in anything steady.

  The neighbour from the other side of Clara’s house, a large, pale-beige man who had moved in a few months before, came down his front steps. His difficult name was either Bradley Brent or Brent Bradley.

  “I don’t know what you�
�re doing over there,” he shouted over, when he caught sight of her. As if he’d been trying to get hold of her for days, to get this off his chest. “But if you’re renting rooms, there’s a bylaw for that. You could find yourself in hot water.”

  Clara and Mrs. Zenko stared at him.

  “One call to the city,” he said. “That’s all it would take.”

  He got into his truck and backed loudly out of the driveway.

  His plump little hen-wife scrambled out their front door and ran down to the truck, carrying a covered dish. She climbed up and in, and they drove off in a tearing of loose stones over the asphalt.

  “What’s with him?” Clara asked Mrs. Zenko.

  “They’re off to church. An awful lot of these men are impatient nowadays,” she said, sad for them. “My John was a great one for keeping his temper. Your father, too.”

  “I feel sorry for Mrs. Bradley. Mrs. Brent.”

  “I can never remember either,” Mrs. Zenko said, with her deep little laugh.

  To give herself a clear mind, or else to delay, Clara went to church before going to the hospital. She slipped in late to the early service and did not genuflect, but crossed herself quickly. She always felt slightly snooty crossing herself, but her mother had ingrained it in her. All this ritual was so complicated: whether to stand for communion or kneel, stand or kneel for prayer, fold hands or adopt the charismatic pose, swaying and open-palmed. Many of the older women, surprisingly, swayed.

  It was all superstition, anyway. Just sitting there, being there, was the essential thing, she had come to believe. But of course she could be wrong.

  The Gospel was Mary choosing the better part, to let the dishes go and listen to Jesus talking in the living room—a reading that always annoyed Clara, although she’d never considered herself a Martha. What would happen if she let go of the dishes now? It would be all right, because Mrs. Zenko would do them for her, popping in and out of the kitchen with her bright glance catching everything, tidy little ears pricked for the conversation while she got supper cleared up without a wasted movement or a sigh or a fuss. Occupied with Mrs. Zenko’s holiness, Clara had trouble keeping her mind on the sermon. Paul Tippett was telling an anecdote. She wondered if he made them up, since so many were apropos, but that was ungenerous. Anyone’s life is full of meaning. She should have phoned to thank him for visiting Lorraine.

  He was contrasting Mary and Martha with last week’s Gospel on the Good Samaritan—she hadn’t consciously heard a word of it, as she sat fretting and deciding.

  “A man no one would think of as saintly, a dirty Samaritan, took practical action to save the life of someone left to die by the side of the road. Today, Jesus scolds Martha for her brand of practicality, and insists that spiritual discussion is more important than putting the supper on. Why is practicality praised in one case, and in the other, reviled? I don’t think that’s too strong a word, reviled, for the way we call women Marthas with an edge of contempt, because they are busy in the kitchen feeding the masses. Jesus himself was good at feeding the masses. And staying under budget.”

  Paul seemed so pleased with this loaves-and-fishes nudge that Clara couldn’t help laughing. She hoped she hadn’t been too loud.

  “The Samaritan acts in a moment of genuine crisis, when no one can see his goodness. But the flavour of self-importance in Martha’s actions, and her peevishness toward her sister, may be uncomfortably familiar to us when we think of our own acts of goodness and how we look for recognition of our work.”

  Clara wondered whether Lisanne Tippett scolded Paul for idleness or lounged at the feet of bishops while he did the dishes. Or both. Then she erased that, mean-spirited.

  “These stories remind me of Hebrews 13: Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. I’ve been inspired this week by an instance of practical charity, one of our own parishioners—I’ll let her remain anonymous—who has opened her house to strangers.” He did not look at her. Clara felt hot and ashamed anyway, and hoped her face was not flushed. Or maybe he was not talking about her, she thought, hare-brainedly.

  “Her ordinary, private action reminds me that as humans together in the world we are essential to the purposes of God.”

  It felt like lying, to be called essential to the purposes of God when she was doing exactly what she wanted to do. It was only luck that her purposes and God’s coincided this time.

  The others sang while Clara stood silent, acidly aware of her own falseness in being there at all. None of the words of church made sense to her. The Creed—what part of that could she say she believed? Resurrection of the body, life everlasting, not those…She thought of her mother and father falling to shreds in their graves, and then, sharply, of Lorraine. But Lorraine would get better.

  But she did not think so.

  The long communion prayers wore on, and Paul lifted the cup. A slight commotion rose in the back of the church: a man came in, walking too loudly. Frank Rich, the doe-eyed sidesman, helped him to a leaflet out of habit. From the corner of her eye Clara could see that it was a stumbling drunk. She was glad the children were at home.

  The man wore a big black felt hat. He veered slowly up the aisle, working against gravity, but advancing—an oil tanker, inexorable toward the coast. When he passed Clara his hand fell heavily on the arched end of the pew in front of her: large, oddly clean, long-fingered, with veins standing out, like the close-up of a surgeon’s hand in an old movie. She glanced up to see his face under the shadow of his hat. Pock-marked skin, squinting eyes still aiming for the altar. He was not very old for a wino.

  The congregation was still and silent, waiting.

  Paul found drunks difficult, and braced himself to leap over his fear and distaste. But it was right that the man should come to church, and somehow strengthening that the congregation would be worried and ashamed. Brushing from whom the stiffened puke / i put him all into my arms / and staggered banged with terror through / a million billion trillion stars… The man held out his cupped hands at the rail and Paul gave him communion—the wine too—then let Frank Rich usher him down to the front pew. But he stood again, very tall, and came back up to the rail.

  “Are you in trouble?” Paul asked.

  The man’s head lifted. His eyes stared into Paul’s, their focus coming slowly home, resolving into human sense and pain.

  Down in the pews the congregation shifted. Clara could feel the cowardly anxiety of well-off people in the presence of disaster. And felt it herself. Paul was talking so quietly that no one could hear the words. The man answered, louder but unintelligible. He was swaying now. He bent down to hold the rail. Paul lifted the movable section, took the man’s arm and helped him out the side door to the vestry. Paul’s murmur covered the man’s ramblings as they went so that Clara could not hear anything but a noise of confusion and sorrow. He is good, Clara thought, a little surprised.

  Paul was gone a long time. The congregation sat meditating on communion, or on alcoholism, or the homeless, or the poor whom we have always with us, Clara thought; or just aimlessly, peacefully, passing the time. Remembering her own responsibility, she prayed for Lorraine, the words wooden and empty.

  Dolly slid her thin body between the sharp-twigged hedge and the fencepole, into the back yard of the house beside Clary’s. She needed something to do, to stop from thinking all the time. The next-door guy had yelled at his wife for a while, Come on, come on, come on, and when she went scurrying through she slammed the front door to lock it. But Dolly was betting she had not locked the back door. Yes, it opened.

  The back landing was the same inside as Clary’s, but switched over, reversed. It was dark and smelled of stinky meat. Dolly slipped between piles of newspapers lining the steps, up the wrong side into the kitchen. Brown and gold linoleum, the same as Mrs. Lyne’s trailer in Winnipeg, dark brown cupboards. The counters under the cupboards were stacked with old magazines. No cookie jars. Dolly checked the fridge—no cake. Leftover ca
sserole with crusty macaroni around the edges. In the pantry she found a bag of pretzels with an elastic band around it. She unrolled the bag and ate a few, walking around the wrong-way circle of kitchen, dining room, living room. It was weird to be in a backwards house, like folding your fingers with your other hand on top. In here, shiny maple country furniture crowded in bunches. The chairs had plastic wraps on the arms. The dining room table was piled with paper and files and newspaper clippings, all their edges straight as if that made it okay.

  On the hall divider shelf sat three ugly teddy bears, one dressed in baby clothes. That one stuck out over the edge and Dolly nearly knocked it off. She stopped it wobbling. The clock in the hall made a really loud ticking. The mail was there: Mr. B. Bunt, Mr. & Mrs. Bunt, Occupant. Nothing interesting. She put the pretzels back in the pantry and went down the hall, peeking into two little bedrooms packed tight with boxes and papers: too hard to search. Their bathroom was pink and black, a woolly swan on the shower curtain. Dusty razor blades and pill bottles stuffed in the medicine chest. Nothing was very clean.

  The main bedroom was full of bears, like a collection on TV: shelves of them, a hundred teddy bears sitting all over a giant bed covered with drooping pink satin, like icing. Dolly sat on the slippery bed and played with some of the bears, the less-pink ones. One lying close by the pillow had a nightcap on and a candle in his paw, and a zipper pocket on his butt to hold pyjamas. He crinkled. Dolly unzipped his pocket, and there was a lot of money. A lot of money, all sharp-edged brown hundred dollar bills.

  She sat looking at it. First and last month’s rent, right there.

  A rush of air gasped down the hall, as the front door opened.