by Dolly Dennis
Anyhow, I settled for a dollar-store wedding. Would my marriage follow the same path? Wasn’t I worth more? But at that time I just wanted to be loved, and Frosty loved me and Irene, so I overlooked the other failings. Nobody’s perfect, and besides, I was happy.
We wrote our own vows and declared them in the middle of a golden canola field, the sun bursting with pride in shades of tangerine and burgundy behind us. I mean, Frosty being the poet and all, he insisted. I walked away wearing a wedding band from Woodward’s. Mrs. Garnet and Frosty’s crazy mother helped set up a barbecue reception, and all the men donned western gear and do-si-doed past midnight in the barn, where loudspeakers blared country music: Alabama, the Judds, Waylon Jennings. You get the picture. Probably scared away half the wildlife. The women guests, I swear, all looked like they were related to Tammy Wynette or Dolly Parton, and they all advised me to stand by my man. Out here, one of them told me, men are men and women are glad of it. Whether they were or not was a moot point.
It was a day of wonder, where everyone, including Irene, looked like a photo shoot for Western Living magazine, everyone neat and clean; nothing fancy. Mona grudgingly acted as maid of honour. She was still my best friend, after all. Frosty’s brothers attended, the youngest serving as best man.
Eventually, the music died and the wedding guests departed; a handful of Denton’s restless friends and immediate family members remained behind to sober up before driving home. They shot at empty beer cans poised precariously on several fence posts in back of the house, the beams from parked trucks, vans, and the porch light illuminating the makeshift shooting range against the backdrop of night. Hee-haw!
Too much drinking obliterated any human decency. Frosty’s drunken siblings vied for attention as Denton dared his brothers to arm-wrestle or jump over the bonfire, and always it was Denton who took the lead clearing the licks of flames, while everyone else would chicken out and just watch. When everyone eventually settled down to a peaceful moment around the fire waiting for daybreak, the prairie night exploded with yelling and screaming, their mother raging about how her father, Frosty’s ruthless grandfather, had repeatedly beaten the cow. After a while the mom’s eyes would glaze over, but then she would start again: “He beat Daisy with a stick because she wouldn’t milk when he said so …” On and on her voice whined, her emotions rising until she was in a near frenzy. Frosty had to calm her down with a slug of bourbon. Get her to a therapist, I thought. We should have eloped. Married quietly. But I was looking for a caring family. Were there not any out here who, even if they might not be the Waltons, were close enough? Was dysfunction the order of a prairie day?
A momentary lapse in judgment. Too late, I was now Adeen Whitlaw. I thought of Irene. I was doing this for her and all doubts erased themselves. I wondered what my own mother would make of my marriage to Frosty. I could hear her: Trash. You know what we do with garbage like you. She made me crazy, made an emotional girl like me want to kill. I shrugged off my fossilized childhood and remembered to seize the day. Carpe diem, as they say. Live in the moment, Mona would tell me. Joy today. Let me taste it before it rots, shrivels, and dies like a forgotten apricot in a fruit bowl. I did the best I could. Honestly.
Anyhow, I refused to live in Frosty’s trailer, and to prove his all-consuming love for me and Irene, he accommodated my wishes and boarded Twister and Boss with Denton. While searching for a place to live, we came across an apartment building, the Complex Arms, in Mill Woods, and so our married life began. We opened a savings account for our dream house. One day I rushed home after an evening walk, excited to have passed a new neighbourhood being built across several blocks down the road from us. I loved the show home, a bungalow with bay windows, attached garage, and a small lawn. Perfect.
“Come see, Frosty,” I said. “Found our dream house. It’s gorgeous.” I would drag him there for a view, make a detour on our family walks in the evening, the three of us, nodding by our future home, me pointing to Irene and the house and saying that will be ours one day. And Irene would jump up and down in her happy dance, clapping her hands harder and harder as though that would please me even more. Frosty would squint, drag on a cigarette, case out the area for the nearest liquor store and say, “That’s not what I had in mind. An acreage, somewhere with privacy, no nosy noisy neighbours.”
“But it would be a start, Frosty,” I tried to convince him.
He had other things in mind.
Irene took to her stepfather immediately, but my exuberance slowly faded as the years wore on. Frosty continued to work in the barns at Northlands Raceway, grooming and feeding the thoroughbreds, but the occasional bet eventually escalated to a compulsive habit that developed into an outright fondness for gambling. He managed to live a rather rudderless life, keeping his addiction secret until one day the bank called and repossessed our lives. I was stunned. We both wept while he begged forgiveness and vowed abstinence from his temptation.
I remembered my wedding vows, for better or for worse, so I gave him another chance, but his compulsion to visit casinos periodically reoccurred without my knowledge, finally exhausting not only our bank account, but also my spirit. Yet I never left him.
After he bolted out of the apartment that night with the threat of going to the casino, I waited up for him until daylight seeped through the half-drawn bedroom venetians and the chickadees and swallows woke up the neighbourhood with their usual arguments about one thing or another.
“Shut up, you stupid birds. I’m trying to sleep. I hate you,” I screamed at them. I lay back on the bed, studying the dancing shadows on the walls, never realizing until then how our apartment could use a fresh coat of paint. In fact, the entire building could use some freshening up. Cheap contractor material. Walls never primed. MDF for kitchen cupboards. Nothing lasts here, for sure. I wanted to sneak upstairs, knock on Velvet’s door, and find Frosty there. It would be the last straw, but I guess I really didn’t want to know; instead, drunk on too much beer, I wobbled to the balcony with the achy back of needing a new mattress. With a large coffee cup in hand, I slouched over the railing with an unsteady grip and splashed some of the brown liquid below.
The quiet made me momentarily think of Irene. I wanted to call Mona, see how she and Irene were getting along, but I erased that thought. Best not to know. Mona with her loving assertiveness knew how to handle Irene, keep her occupied, but then she didn’t have any distractions like a lazy husband or an apartment building to manage mostly by herself. Easy for her.
I meditated on the unoccupied farmland before me and how it always overwhelmed, distracted me from my problems, especially in the early morning when everything lay slow and low, no one creeping, being loud and obnoxious. I would reach out to my innocence, my youth spent in the gritty streets of Montreal with their rackets of pedestrian traffic, patois of language, a mix of French and English and something else. The Parisian boutiques with their designer clothes, the gourmet restaurants serving poutine on fancy plates, and the dance clubs I relished but never favoured because I was the mother of a child who required too much care. You made your bed, now you can lie in it, my mother’s tired refrain, inherited from her own mother, and her mother and … settled into family myth. It never left me.
I wondered what would have happened if I had stayed in Montreal. Life’s questions left unanswered. The road not taken. Got that from a poem somewhere. School, I think. It had stuck with me. No point looking back. A teacher once told me that all paths lead to where you were always meant to be.
By now I should have been living on an estate, an acreage — at least soaking in a hot tub, Denton’s wife’s words bounced back, I wonder how the poor people live. I guess it was never meant to be. I was always angry and I didn’t know why.
After the death of Frosty’s wealthy grandmother on his father’s side, all the grandkids received a small inheritance. Except Frosty. At every family event, they would all suck up to the old lady. Even Frosty’s mother whispered to me at our wedding, “Be
nice to Grandma and she might leave you something, wink wink.” For me, this went against all my values and basic principles of kindness, honesty, and integrity taught by the Catholic nuns. I was gobsmacked by that kind of talk. Frosty was the worst of the lot. At her funeral he read a poem he’d composed as part of the eulogy, an attempt to redeem himself in her dead eyes, but Grandma wasn’t listening. She lay in her expensive mahogany coffin, a Madame Tussaud wax figure with a forced smile, the sagging skin folded under her chin and neck like a botched facelift. She surprised the family and left Frosty’s portion of the inheritance to me. After all, I was the reliable one: hard-working and level-headed. Frosty was a bewildered cowpoke when he tore open the letter with the will from the estate lawyer. I told him there must be some mistake, but there it was.
Frosty claimed that since I was his wife the money belonged to him also. We argued. Looking back, I think this was the beginning of the end for our marriage. Money always changes the dynamics of a relationship.
“Whose name is on this piece of paper? Aye? Aye?” I shouted. “She left it all to me.” The twenty-five-thousand-dollar inheritance was enough for a down payment on a house, was mine to do with as I pleased. So close to my dream of home ownership.
He broke down; a grown western hunk of a man, on his knees begging for an inheritance that was not his to take. “What did you do, Frosty, that she left nothing for you?” He didn’t reply. It was left for me to find out.
Anyhow, that’s the story there.
ROSEMARY
Five years ago, Rosemary Androski stood in front of her rural classroom, opened her mouth like a guppy and not a word escaped. Diagnosis: a nervous breakdown brought on by the death of the last of the men who had molested her when she was a child. There were three. A year later her husband, Walter, suffered a stroke. With his encroaching dementia and her need for counselling, the Androskis decided it was best to sell their farm in the Peace River and relocate to Edmonton so both could receive the medical attention required.
Her daily trek to the psychiatric outpatient clinic at the Royal Alexandra Hospital became routine. A noonday visit with her therapist, shopping at the Mill Woods Town Centre, which always invigorated her, a cup of coffee, a forbidden chocolate doughnut in the food court, and then home. The day nurse remained with Walter until her return, but his care and feeding at night fell to Rosemary. Despite her own emotional fragility, she learned to live without a decent conversation from the man she married fifty years ago. Like Irene, he now spoke a language of sounds. The things Rosemary missed more than her beloved farm, her five sons who rarely visited, and her position as a rural school teacher, were friendship, companionship, intimacy, and unadulterated sex — all things that Walter could no longer provide.
The bus driver drops her off in front of the Complex Arms. The folded doors open in a double-edged sigh. She dismounts in that unhurried pace that characterizes the elderly. Tall and big-boned, she holds her seventy years in a regal posture of defiance against the gravity of age. In her youth she vowed never to become one of those cranky old ladies with their eyes searching the ground for pennies or craters that might cause a fall. So her head is always held high, nose in the air.
Rosemary swallows her breath and hiccups. Heartburn accompanies all the other assaults of old age. She lingers on the sidewalk until the bus rounds the corner and is out of sight before she exhales, preparing for what she will find inside — Walter asleep, nostrils plugged with tubes tethered to an oxygen tank. He is eighty after all, and ill with a menu of chronic diseases. Rosemary wonders why people live so long if they can’t take care of themselves. “I’ll kill myself before that happens to me. It’s so inconvenient for everyone, isn’t it?” she once confided to her therapist.
Her arthritic knees are bothering her today, so she shuffles like the blind. Despite her care, Rosemary manages to twist her ankle on the lip of the cement walk and she falls, scraping her knees and the palms of her hands. The contents of her Safeway bag — a litre of milk, bread, bananas, and a half litre of Ensure for Walter — scatter before her like runaway bowling balls. She used to be so strong. So healthy.
After she methodically gathers the downed groceries, she stalls a moment and stretches her torso to either side, revving up her legs to start moving again. She shuffles with determination toward the building, and by the time she reaches her apartment, she is walking upright again, head still held high like Queen Elizabeth inspecting the Welsh Guards at Windsor Castle.
Even with all the windows open, the interior of the two-bedroom suite carries the claustrophobic odour of illness, the hefty melancholy of the dying.
“Is that you, Rosemary?”
She turns her head toward the voice; Adeen exiting Walter’s bedroom.
“Barbara had an emergency at home so she asked me to stay until you got home. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Oh, dear. Barb is such a gem. I’ll have to call her and see if she needs anything. Oh, dear, oh, dear. And how is my Walter today?”
Adeen updates her on his condition, trying to read a scribble of indecipherable notes left by the home nurse, but Rosemary is too busy to bother. She is soaping her bruised hands and knees with dish detergent and paper towels by the kitchen sink.
“He should really be in a hospital. Such a burden for you.”
Rosemary ignores the comment. Adeen knows she should keep her mouth shut but it is not in her nature. “Don’t be so self-righteous,” Frosty always scolds her.
“Well then, I’ll go but if there’s anything you need, let me know, okay, Rosemary?”
“I’m here now, so you can go.”
“Well then, goodbye.”
“Goodbye and thank you,” Rosemary says as Adeen discreetly closes the door behind her.
Now there remains only the sound of Walter’s laboured breathing and the beeping from the heart monitor.
Rosemary puts away her groceries, except for the Ensure, and rummages through her bag, spilling the contents of her day onto the kitchen table: pills for her depression and anxiety, her active bladder, her sluggish blood pressure; a book, Jane Fonda’s Prime Time ; her change purse, a comb, a couple of Poise pads, and apartment keys. She shoves a Cozaar and Losartan for her blood pressure down her throat with an index finger as though she were about to induce vomit and gulps water from her water jug. She removes a teacup and teaspoon from the kitchen cupboard and pours the Ensure. Rosemary approaches Walter’s bed, sets the cup on his night table, and listens, counting the intervals between breaths.
Adeen, or perhaps it was Barb, had tucked Walter in his bed, and he now appears to be asleep.
“Walter.”
He answers in short snorts and gulps as though reaching for air.
“Walter. Adeen thinks I should put you in a home, but then what would I do? All alone in this apartment, what would I do without you?”
She curls a strand of his hair behind his ear and smiles.
“You can do with a haircut, Walter. You’re starting to look like an old hippie.”
She rubs his forearm, as though by a magical genie trick he will wake up and be the effervescent Walter she once knew.
“How does that feel? I know you aren’t sleeping. Open your eyes, dear, and look at me.”
Still no response.
“I brought you something to eat. I know you don’t like it, but I found this new chocolate flavour. Chocolate was always your favourite, remember?”
He blinks as though preparing to speak, rolling his head slightly toward her, eyes black slits, and was that a smile or smirk, she wonders. She scoops a teaspoon of Ensure but he remains steadfast and moves his face away from her offering.
“Okay, Walter, maybe later.” She sets the cup of Ensure back on the bedside table. Perhaps once it is warmed up, he might want to take a sip. Walter hasn’t eaten anything solid in weeks, and every day he weakens, sleeping all day as though he were bracing to die.
He shuts his eyes again and she caresses his once mus
cular arm, strokes his bulky farmer’s hand: square, rough with callouses, and fingertips stained from too many unfiltered cigarettes, now just a fragile attachment to his arm. With an impulsive need, she guides the useless hand to her breast and holds it there until he stirs. His eyelids flutter but he is still overwhelmed by fatigue. She releases his hand, letting it involuntarily plop by his side in its usual place. She finds her voice.
“I was so young when I married you, Walter. Twenty. And you, you an old man, in my eyes anyway, at thirty. I never thought we would last, but here we are fifty years later. Never told you this, but I knew you bribed my poor parents with money so they would let you marry me. You must have really loved me, or is it that you were just desperate for some help with the chores?”
And then she blurts: “I didn’t love you then, Walter, but I have to admit that over the years I have grown rather fond of you. Maybe that’s love. Is that possible? What about you, Walter. Did you love me? You never said it out loud, not even when we made love. I sometimes thought you just used my body like hired help.”
She waits for a reply, some movement, but there is none. She bends over his bedside and kisses his forehead like he is one of her sons. The Mill Woods train whistles in the distance. A nightly lullaby, a comfort for Rosemary, reminding her of home and that she is not alone.
“I love you, Walter.”
A faint wind breezes through the open window, lifting the hem of the flimsy curtains.
“Ah, that feels better. Maybe we’ll get some rain soon. Remember how we used to sleep with our feet outside the covers so we could feel the cool sheets on a hot summer day. So hot today.