When I parked the pram outside the Liquor Board store, the children were so fascinated by a micturating dog at a nearby lamppost that they hardly noticed me go. As the dog moved round, repeatedly lifting its leg, Martha gazed at the spectacle, enraptured as the witness to a miracle, while Hugh strained so far out for a better view that only the harness kept him from falling out on his head. This reminded me of Billie’s favourite story about how, trundling me along one day in my push-chair, she’d absent-mindedly not only tipped me out, but run over me. This was so typical of both of us that I had to smile, forgetting for a moment that stepping into the Liquor Control Board of Ontario premises was no laughing matter.
There was no Muzak here. Indeed, the general aim seemed to be to discourage buying, as far as possible. If you insisted on spending your money on alcohol, of course the provincial government would let you do it; but they made sure that pleasure played no part in the transaction. No shelves of glowing wines or bottles of spirits colourfully labelled were on display to encourage impulse buying; all the merchandise was hidden away at the back. You had to write down your choice by coded number on a grim little form to which a pencil was tethered, and present this to a civil servant behind the counter, who consequently never had to speak to you. This functionary, buttoned into a grey dust-jacket, was only a shade less dour than his colleague in a glass cage across the room, who took your money through a grill and returned change down a small metal chute, as if customers were carriers of some dread disease. It always surprised me how forbidding the atmosphere was in these places, in view of the indecently huge profits made annually by the province in its monopoly of liquor sales. Perhaps they wanted to spread the guilt around, and if this was the aim, they were highly successful. No matter how cheerful you might feel on going in, you were sure to emerge rather depressed.
There was a long queue at the counter which I meekly joined, clutching my little order form. An electric clock on the wall jerked past the minutes like a memento mori. Notices here and there informed us that smoking was forbidden, persons under eighteen would not be served, dogs were banned, and cheques were not accepted. The only advertisements were posters promoting Canadian wines, and these were so small as to be almost furtive.
At the head of the line was a man engaged in buying the booze for some unimaginably huge party. Our queue shifted patiently from foot to foot while two grey clerks paced to and from the nether regions carrying bottles, and packed cartons with his purchases, while a third glumly ticked off the items. The customer kept glancing around at us as if embarrassed. From time to time he coughed behind his hand, and the cough spread down the line.
It was not consoling to look along that queue and find that everyone in it was, as it were, single – a sort of discard. The fat woman, the little man in the baseball cap, the thin lady in fuchsia trousers – old and young, they all had the stamp of the loner. Even the austere tall man with the fur coat, and the dyed woman with the sapphire ring, were somehow recognizable as exiles from the cosy, nuclear family. And there I was with all the rest of the sad, defeated ones – widowers, divorcées, bachelors, survivors. When they coughed, I coughed too.
At last the big buyer seized his purchases and scuttled off with them in instalments. From his pessimistic look, one could tell the party was going to be a failure. His place was taken by a diminutive old lady in a black hat with ear-flaps. She had no order form, and the clerk frowned at her.
“I wonder if you’d be good enough to tell me the name of a really nice wine,” she asked in a clear little thready voice.
The clerk looked at her briefly. “List over there, lady,” he said. “Hundreds of ’em. Take your choice.”
“But that’s just it, there are so many. You see, I don’t know which one to … it’s for my son’s birthday,” she added helpfully.
The clerk sighed.
“My husband’s dead now, and even when he was alive we never – but Bob went to France last summer, and he – since then – well, of course I never have anything in the house now except maybe a bottle of sherry at Christmastime, so I really don’t know what kind of wine would be nice for him, you see.”
The clerk shrugged. A little stir went down the line. “He’s coming for dinner,” she went on. “I don’t see very much of him – he’s a busy man – but I’d like him to have a nice wine. I’m making his favourite –”
“List is over there, lady,” repeated the clerk. His dead eyes were already looking over her shoulder, but nobody stepped forward to take her place.
“You want red or white, dear?” spoke up the fat lady two places ahead of me. Her coat was held together in front by an inadequate safety-pin, and her vast legs overflowed a pair of unzipped, flopping men’s boots. She was probably spending her welfare cheque on liquor, and I warmly approved of her. She had a hoarse, fruity voice, and eyes of a jovial blue shone in the fat red expanse of her face.
“It rather depends on how much you want to spend,” remarked the tall man, looking down at the little lady through the bottoms of his bifocals.
“Yes, but don’t you muck around with any of that Hungarian or Chilean stuff; go for a nice clean claret, or maybe a good Liebfraumilch.” This was contributed by the sapphire woman behind me with the frizzed purple hair. She looked like a semi-retired call-girl.
“Look, there’s a South American burgundy I picked up here on sale last week – ask Laughing Boy there if he’s got any of it left.” The little chap in the baseball cap fixed us with the cheeky, cheerful eye of a town sparrow and added, winking, “It went a treat with my baked beans.”
“Why don’t you try some Australian –” contributed someone else.
“No, no,” protested the fur man. “That stuff takes the enamel right off your teeth.”
The little lady in the ear-flaps looked hopefully from one face to another, and we all felt protective of her. Thinking of my mother coming for the Happy Hour, and my children parked out there in their pram, I suddenly felt rich, powerful, and generous.
“Look, if you’d like to come over here with me,” I said to her, “we could look at the list. I’ll show you some of the good ones that don’t cost too much. There’s quite a good range of –”
“The price doesn’t matter,” she said rather stiffly. “I don’t mind paying as much as three-fifty or even four dollars. After all, it’s his birthday, isn’t it?” She looked at me severely, and I hastily said, “Of course. Right. Now let’s see what they’ve got here.…”
The tall man and the fat lady both tagged along as advisers. After a lively discussion that soon got nowhere, it was clear that the old dear was going to be dead long before she found the ability to choose between red and white. Finally, after some argument, the committee chose a Portuguese rosé, and I filled out the form for her.
“That won’t be too strong, now, will it?” she asked, frowning doubtfully. “The Portuguese, after all, they’re like the Spanish aren’t they, such violent people?”
“No, no; it will be mild as milk,” we assured her, and sent her off to the counter with smiles and encouraging pats. We fell into line again behind her with an obscure sense of accomplishment. We had defeated, for the moment anyway, the forces of indifference, so much more deadly than the forces of evil. I hoped the old lady’s busy son would appreciate his wine.
Whistling, I packed my bottles in among the kids’ legs and pushed them off at a brisk pace to the greengrocer’s. There the pyramids of bright fruit and scrubbed vegetables, and the fresh, green smell, were so alluring that I bought a number of things we didn’t really need. As I manoeuvred myself and my purchases out of the doorway, I all but collided with Margaret Neilson coming in with her two big girls.
“Why Margaret – hi, kids – I thought you were still in Boston.”
“No, we got back last night. How are you doing?”
“Well, as you see –”
“Nine more days, isn’t it?” It was typical of Margaret to know my delivery date as well as or bette
r than I knew it myself.
“That’s right. You still willing to take over my menagerie daytimes while I’m in hospital?”
“Of course. It’s all organized.”
I knew with humility that it was. Margaret was the kind of woman who sewed on buttons before they fell off, and baked and froze Christmas cakes in July. As for perfect motherhood, she might have invented it. Her children were planned, and arrived accurately three years apart. She had even organized their begetting to the day and the hour, in order to ensure females. This impressed me enormously when I first heard her account of it, even though it was hard after that to look her husband in the eye. As they grew into their teens, she kept the girls so fully occupied with swimming, music, karate, and yoga lessons that they had no spare time whatever left over for sex or drugs. This, at any rate, was the idea; but those kids had a demure look that sometimes made me wonder. It was impossible genuinely to like Margaret, of course; but you had to admire her.
Unlike me with my haphazard, small-hours reading, Margaret belonged to a Canadian-book-review group and a left-wing book club. She had season tickets for an experimental theatre. One night a week she took an “interest course” at one of the city colleges. One day a week she did volunteer work for a hospital. In all these worthwhile activities she had tried at various times – without success – to enlist me. Something about that word “worthwhile” put me off. But “You mustn’t stagnate, Anne,” she kept saying earnestly. To which the subversive in me longed to say, “Why not?” However, by this time, because she was basically kind, she had pretty well accepted the fact that I was beyond salvation, and as a consequence was kinder to me than ever.
Certainly I’d never done anything to deserve such a perfect neighbour. From the day I first ran to her for help, eighteen-month-old Martha having locked herself into the bathroom, Margaret had been the ideal friend, calm, cheerful, and efficient. And yet it was Margaret, ironically enough, who was responsible – indirectly of course – for the worst row Ross and I ever had. Like most marital battles it was about nothing, and yet about everything, and it left trivial wounds that would perhaps never heal.
“I suppose you wouldn’t by any chance like a Siamese kitten?” she asked me over coffee one morning soon after Hugh was born. “A friend of mine out in Mississauga breeds them. She’s keen to get rid of this last litter before they go away on sabbatical, and apparently this one’s the last. He’s going cheap, in other words. Ten weeks old, seal point, male. And he’s got a pedigree that makes me feel like a peasant.”
“Oh, I don’t really think …” I said cautiously. It had gradually been borne in on me that prudence wasn’t my strong point, and this created a vague sense of guilt. But, even as I spoke, I remembered that Ross had a birthday coming up in a few days and I hadn’t been able to find any present nice enough to buy for him. Just the same, I strongly suspected he would not approve of a kitten, so I added, “No, I don’t think we really need a cat, with all we’ve got to cope with around here. We didn’t really need a basset hound either, of course; but when you find a stray actually starving in the streets … anyhow, Ross was all set to turn her over to the city pound, but when we found out how they finish them off, he took her to the vet instead. A hundred dollars later she was spayed, vaccinated, tagged, and all ours. And I sometimes think he likes her more than he does the children. She doesn’t make half the noise or mess, that’s sure.”
“Well, a kitten’s no problem, as far as that goes,” said Margaret briskly. “This one’s house-trained, of course. You could let it out for exercise in your little garden here. They’re terrific company, you know – bright and very affectionate. I’d take it myself, but cats make Harvey sneeze. Tell you what, why don’t we drive out there this afternoon, just for fun, and have a look at it?”
“Sure, if you like. But I’m not going to buy any cats.”
Four hours later I was back home with a wicker basket containing a kitten with sapphire eyes and a loud, dictatorial voice. For an hour or more he sniffed over every inch of the premises, critically inspected the furniture, tasted one or two of the house plants, and terrorized Violet, who fled upstairs and hid under a bed. To offers of food or other blandishments he was totally deaf; he was clearly too busy. Finally he went to the litter-box I’d put down and used it with dignity, his blue eyes austerely fixed on the middle distance. After long and fastidious scrapings, he suddenly shot out of the box and climbed me like a tree. A couple of whisks round after his tail; then he settled on my shoulder and began to purr.
Ross was very late getting home that evening, and we both fell asleep in the armchair waiting for him. The scrape of his key in the lock roused us, and the kitten sat upright on my knee, his dark ears pricked.
The stooped figure with the briefcase paused in the doorway. “Where the hell did that come from?” it inquired crossly.
“He’s from me to you. Happy birthday, love.”
Ross disappeared to drop his case and hang up his coat. He then went out to the kitchen and ran a glass of water. While out there, he evidently gave himself stern orders about self-control, because when he got back to us he had that disagreeable, swollen look that goes with keeping one’s temper.
“Now, I know you’ll probably raise objections,” I began with a disarming smile, “but this creature is really too special for that. So loving you wouldn’t believe. And he can retrieve a paper ball. I didn’t teach him – he just does it. And see how beautiful.”
But Ross, mouth set in a tight line, had settled in the armchair opposite and opened the Star with a crackle.
I began to feel affronted in a personal kind of way. The kitten jumped off my knee and went over to sniff at Ross’s shoes. He paid no attention to it, and my blood began to simmer. Nothing could be more insulting than the dignified coldness Ross had inherited from all those successful ancestors of his. “Well, is that all you have to say?” I demanded.
His glasses came around the edge of the newspaper. “Anne, there is nothing to say. Wherever that cat came from, it’s going back. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is. One more thing to be responsible for I do not need.”
“Are you implying I’m a dead weight? You know damn well Professor Stein’s promised to take me back at the lab as soon as Hugh’s weaned. I think you’re being unnecessarily bloody, anyhow, about a birthday present – when it was the nicest thing I could find to give you.”
“I am not going to fight with you, Anne. Only that cat goes back.”
“What you mean is, you don’t give a shit what I think or how I feel, right?”
The hand gripping the paper shook; then he threw it to the carpet, startling the kitten into a sideways leap.
“What I mean is,” he shouted, “I’m fed up with you tanking over me as if I didn’t exist. When do I ever get to vote around here? About anything? The mood takes you to paint the kitchen purple or adopt a dog, and I’m supposed to tag along, Mr. Yes Dear. Well, I’m not going to do it any more. I warn you, I’m fed up. Dangerously fed up.”
The violence of this attack shook me, and to my own disgust I heard a querulous little voice say, “I thought you liked cats.”
“For Christ’s sake, what’s that got to do with it! You’re a woman supposed to have brains, but you can be so dumb –”
“It’s not dumb to wonder why anybody would get into such a fizz just because his wife gives him a birthday present.”
He took a deep breath and tried to get hold of himself. “This present of yours – if you insist on bringing it down to cases – it’s going to do nothing for me but run up vet’s bills, eat the plants, and wreck the furniture your father’s probably still paying for. Now, I don’t know about you, but if Max and Billie came here for dinner and found the chairs in rags, I would personally be embarrassed. It’s bad enough to be under an obligation like that in the first place, or have you forgotten that another man’s had to furnish my house?”
“So that’s it. Why didn’t you say all this in the
first place, then? I’d have been glad to live with Goodwill castoffs if I’d known you felt that way. But I thought you were big enough to be grateful to Max, not sour and jealous. After all, you accept those cheques your mother keeps on leaving around the house cheerfully enough, don’t you?”
“Will you just leave my mother the hell out of this! Among the other things I’m fed up with is you making a face like sucking lemons every time she comes here, or is even mentioned. You seem to take it as a personal insult every time she does something nice for us.”
“Yes, because she does it for you, not me. She makes it so clear she’s sorry for you, handcuffed to me, you poor victim!”
“Well, maybe that’s not such a way-out view of it. For starters, it was you took me to bed, if you remember. I don’t recall having a whole lot of choice there, either.”
“What a total, rotten lie! You know damn well I was the one that had no bloody choice!”
“Don’t yell like that,” he said, assembling the newspaper fussily.
“I’ll yell all I like! You just don’t want to admit you’re married to your bloody mother, that’s all!”
“You can sit here and scream at the walls if you like. I’m going up – I’ll sleep in the study. And that animal goes back tomorrow, is that clear?”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday, they’ll be up at their ski place.”
“Monday, then.”
And he continued mounting the stairs, back very stiff, the newspaper grasped like a sword in his dexter talon. The kitten watched him go, head on one side, and then began to sharpen its claws on the sofa. Upstairs Hugh woke and began to squall for his ten o’clock feed. Angrily rubbing tears off my face, I went up to him.
It was bad luck that the next day was Saturday, because that meant we had no chance to get away from each other and pretend nothing had happened. It was the first time we’d ever needed that kind of space. Until now, our fights had been short and sharp but, as it were, reversible. This time it was different. I woke up feeling sore all over, as if I’d been beaten. As for Ross, he spoke to me only when absolutely necessary, and with a cold politeness that was worse than abuse. He hung out the baby-wash, he amused Martha while I did another feed, all with a kind of glaze of reserve over him. He appeared not to notice the existence of the kitten, except once to pluck it off the kitchen counter where it was playing with an eggshell.
The Marriage Bed Page 9