A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  And she became a cheerful fixture at the house when she wasn’t babysitting the Weston tribe after school. Bill started to call her Andy and she befriended Margaret, pitched in whenever there was work to be done. She jumped up after supper to dry the dishes, put the ironing board away for Margaret, grabbed an extra dust cloth on Saturday mornings. She did her homework with Paul in the dining room, eating the taffied popcorn Margaret made for them.

  They appeared to be suited to each other. Andy treated Paul the way a young bride would, enjoying him and pleasing him and teaching him how to please her. They made love more often than any of the others and with the happiest enthusiasm. They parked the half-ton in the drive shed out at the farm and climbed into the back with blankets or they crawled into their own beds when they found themselves alone in an empty house. They were firm in their happiness, oblivious, never gave getting caught a second thought. Andy had no questions to ask Paul about his mother’s death, although she held him when he cried and listened quietly the few times he spoke about it, remembered from one time to the next exactly what he had said, the specific words he’d used.

  Margaret knew what they were up to and one night after the dishes were done she quietly reached into her apron pocket and slipped Andy the folded list of contraceptive possibilities that she and Christine Lucas, who was Cooper’s nurse, had come up with between them. She had phoned Christine at home and given her every opportunity to decline the conversation because kids especially were not supposed to be given any official guidance but Christine said she was fine with it. “Go ahead,” she’d told Margaret. “Shoot.”

  “I just wanted to check that there wasn’t something I’m unaware of,” Margaret had told her. “Perhaps something new.”

  “Nothing new under the sun,” Christine said. “Not that I’ve heard about. And I’d hear.”

  They had agreed to list sheaths first, which Christine being Christine called galoshes, then a cap, which she said she could likely get her hands on because there were sometimes one or two lying around the office, then the killer foam, then the Pope’s old standby, rhythm, which Christine said certainly worked for him, and finally they threw in pulling out and abstinence. They’d debated a bit about the pulling out and the abstinence, Margaret’s position being that there was no sense recommending something that wasn’t likely to happen and Christine’s position being you never knew.

  “I heard once that women used to make caps out of lemons cut in half,” Christine said. “Which makes you think about lemonade a little differently.”

  “Really?” Margaret said. “I expect my mother might have used a sponge with vinegar.” Until that moment, she had not once wondered how her mother had solved her own problem.

  “Then likely mine did too,” Christine said. “No such thing now though.” And then she couldn’t stop herself. “Do you mind me asking who this information is for?”

  Margaret did mind and she had prepared herself for the question. But still, she was thoroughly disappointed in Christine. “All and sundry,” she’d said. “All and sundry.”

  Andy just smiled as she read the list of possibilities at the kitchen sink. “It’s fine,” she whispered. “I know what I’m supposed to know. I asked Cooper and he filled me in. But thanks.”

  “Oh,” was all Margaret could think to say. Cooper was taking his chances. But then again, maybe not. Before Andy could return the list, she thought to ask and was pleased she did, “Maybe you could mention some of this to Daphne?”

  “Sure,” Andy told her, still whispering, still smiling. “If you like, I can do that.”

  When Paul wasn’t at the mill working, he took it upon himself to stay close to home. Andy had taught him what it meant to be thoughtful and he tried to anticipate Margaret’s needs, to prevent her from doing any of the heavy work. He cut the grass and set up a fan in the kitchen. He and Andy helped her empty and paint the cupboards, chucking the odd things that had been sitting unused at the back of some of the shelves: a cracked teapot, a rusted strainer, two tins filled with years of unrecognized buttons. They made room for Margaret’s good china which had been waiting all this time in boxes in the basement. Knowing because she was told every time she turned around that she would soon have her hands full, Margaret said what she would really like would be to get the living room and dining room and hall painted. Paul and Andy took right over. They did it all, without any help from Patrick or Murray or Daphne or Bill.

  And the three of them drove into Sarnia to buy a white crib with a good mattress, set it up in the big bedroom where it would stay for a while at the foot of Bill and Margaret’s bed. After that, Daphne would be gone or almost ready to go and the plan was that one end of her room would become the baby’s.

  Bill had told Paul when he got his grade-ten results in June that if his marks didn’t improve considerably by October he would have to hang up his skates for grade eleven. So Paul was planning to work fairly hard when they went back to school. Now that you no longer needed two languages besides English to do anything, he decided he could afford to drop Latin. He thought things should get easier without the Latin and Andy said she thought so too.

  * * *

  AT THE BEGINNING of September, Patrick and Murray started their second year at Western. They liked their apartment and they appreciated the casseroles Margaret sent in, the shepherd’s pie and the meat loaf, the baked beans. On their own they ate a lot of bologna and bread, sometimes not even making the effort to slap these together into a sandwich, and spaghetti and meatballs was a time-consuming big deal, a near feast.

  They studied hard, compared marks. They brought home armloads of books and went for days without talking unless something actually had to be said. Their papers were twice as good as they needed to be and they both began to rank near the top in all the courses that mattered.

  Some weekends Sandra came in on the bus to be with Patrick, telling her parents that she slept on the couch in the living room. She was in grade twelve with Daphne and worked in her aunt’s dress shop after school now, so she had lots of clothes. Murray was happy enough to see Sandra, at least in the beginning. He told her she should bring Daphne with her some weekend, suggested they could go some place, the four of them. But she didn’t bring Daphne and she didn’t say why either, or even if she’d asked her.

  After a couple of months of her visits, Murray got tired of Sandra’s presumption, as if her place in Patrick’s bed gave her the right to make herself entirely at home. He got fed up finding the cereal box empty, or the cheese gone, used as a middle-of-the-night snack, and he got particularly tired of the sounds she made in bed. He practised asking them what the hell they thought the walls were made of and did they think it was enjoyable to listen to, all that groaning and her stupid cat sounds?

  He came in drunk one night and said he wanted some ground rules. He said she could come some weekends but not every weekend. And she could damn well bring some groceries with her. And she could try to use a little vocal restraint when she was on her back.

  In a quiet, mincing voice that was worse than screaming would have been, Sandra asked him why he didn’t just pretend he couldn’t hear anything. She said that’s what friends did. And then she wanted to know why someone with all the money in the whole God damned world would take the time away from his busy schedule to worry about who ate what. Murray didn’t answer her. He was very unsteady on his feet. He went to bed.

  Sandra left in the morning and stayed away for a month. This was what Patrick had been saying he wanted, so it should have made him happy but he soon began to feel marooned without the sex, without sex being there for him, regularly. He sulked around and banged dishes and left the bathroom a roaring mess in the mornings. Murray held back, didn’t say, Tough shit, partner.

  Murray did start to bring the occasional girl back after a session at the library or after a party he’d tripped into, usually someone who looked to have a bit of spirit. When he got one of these girls in bed he would always encourage her to
let herself go, as if he wanted to free her from some sad old restraint. One night after several loud, boisterous sessions in a row, when Patrick and Murray were both in the tiny kitchen, each of them heading for the fridge, Patrick shoved Murray out of the way and then Murray shoved harder, surprisingly hard, and then they pulled themselves back against opposite walls.

  “At least Sandra loves me,” Patrick said. “At least she knows what she wants. She’s not just some little piece, some one-time only.…”

  “What crap,” Murray said, stepping forward to open the fridge door, taking out a beer and handing it off, taking out another. “You don’t love her and she’s the only one on the planet who doesn’t know it because you haven’t got the stones to make her comprehend. What pure crap.”

  Sandra stayed mad. This was her plan gone wrong. Patrick knew that she assumed he was pissed off for the same reason she was angry, that she expected him to do something, to stand up for her, to make it right. But he didn’t. Murray had given him his chance and, unfortunate as it was, he pretty much had to take it. Sandra was going to have to stay mad.

  He had promised in September to take her to the Christmas ball with another couple, some cousin of hers who was in fourth-year law and his girlfriend from McGill. He believed he should stick to that promise, so Sandra came into the city and dragged him downtown to rent a tux to go with the heavy peau-de-soie dress she had just finished. The dress was a soft sea green to set off her dark red hair and it had a scooped neckline that exposed her freckles and her cleavage, which she darkened just before they left the apartment with brown eye shadow, a little trick she said she’d recently learned.

  Before the dance, the four of them went out to a new, classy restaurant for dinner where the guys talked about law and drank too many Rusty Nails, a two-hour start that more or less ruined the rest of the evening. Patrick was hanging over the toilet in his rented tux when Sandra went out the apartment door for the last time, her hair still sprayed to perfection and her sea green dress still beautiful, far too beautiful for rejection.

  A week later Murray’s father arrived out of the blue to have a talk with Patrick. He climbed up the steep derelict stairs to the back door to ask Patrick if he had a few minutes and then told him to get his coat so they could sit in the Buick to have their talk. Sitting in the car he explained to Patrick that he understood he was doing very well, and he asked if he thought a further degree would be useful to him. Patrick confessed that he had been encouraged by one of his professors to keep going, that law looked interesting. Mr. McFarlane told Patrick that he expected nothing in return for what had been provided so far but perhaps they should look at future support as a business deal. He said he would be pleased to see Patrick continue if he would agree to make reasonable repayments when he was properly established, as he most surely would be, in almost no time. He said, “Business goes in cycles and we’re in a slight slump at the mill now, maybe you know that.”

  Patrick said he understood, and thank you, and when he opened the car door, Mr. McFarlane told him that the next weekend he was home they would go up to the bank together to sign a note. He said he would tell the banker Patrick’s word was adequate collateral and a first instalment would be deposited in his account for him to manage as necessary. Patrick recognized Mr. McFarlane’s words as only the courtesy of flattery, the wilful thinking of an old man determined to back a younger, unproven man, but he accepted the flattery because by now he believed what Mr. McFarlane said, he did believe he would be able to hold up his end of the deal.

  Daphne was working hard in grade twelve, carrying two of the grade-thirteen sciences because she had decided on nursing and to make the following year, which was understood to be rough, a little easier. Now that Roger was gone she had more time on her hands, so in November she started to go down to the arena to help teach the smallest skaters their figures and their little routines, to prepare them for the winter carnival when they would all be mice or rabbits on ice.

  She cooked three nights a week at the drive-in and waited for someone to ask her out. No one did. No one else knew that Roger was finished with her and she could hardly make an announcement. She didn’t help Margaret as much as she might have but when her father brought this up at the supper table, as casually as he could, Margaret said, “That’s all right, Bill. She’s already working quite hard enough.”

  Paul settled successfully into grade eleven, and into Andy.

  * * *

  THE GRANDPARENTS STILL stopped in, Bill’s mother and father, Sylvia’s mother and father. None of them talked outright about the pregnancy although they didn’t indicate anything remotely close to shock that Margaret would want and feel entitled to her own child.

  In early December Sylvia’s mother pulled into the shovelled driveway with her trunk open. She came into the kitchen to put a coat over Margaret’s shoulders and then led her out to the car to show her a wicker bassinet, their gift to the baby. She had made a long white eyelet skirt for it and there was a box of satin bows to be attached after the baby was born, when they’d know whether it should be pink or blue. Left on her own, Margaret would not have had bows of any colour, but she was not on her own. She would never again be on her own.

  The two of them lifted the bassinet from the trunk and brought it into the living room. That week and the week that followed, as if everyone had been waiting for a sign, other baby apparatus arrived, a big proud buggy for the spring from Bill’s parents, a playpen, a high chair, rattles and rag dolls and a small zoo of stuffed animals. People just kept arriving at the door with presents. Margaret was astonished that so many would take the trouble.

  On December 19, she went into hard labour straight from sleep. Bill recognized the sounds she made but he wasn’t adequately prepared because he had not expected it to go so fast. He’d just assumed the older the woman, the slower, the more difficult the labour. He got her into the car and drove out of town through the dark, through the light sleet. The big highway was almost empty. There were only a few hulking semis either on their way to the Bluewater Bridge at the border or just off it, heading for Toronto. He was acutely aware of the black ice that coated the sheltered sections of the road, black the worst of all ice because it was invisible in the dark, it was not even there until your headlights made it shine and by that time you were on it, committed.

  As he drove, he talked slowly and deliberately, telling Margaret that from his experience everything seemed exactly normal and that she had to try hard to relax between the contractions, had to keep some of her strength in reserve because she’d be needing it.

  At the hospital, he pulled onto the emergency ramp and ran in to get someone, returning with a nurse who pushed a wheelchair. He followed as she wheeled Margaret inside to a desk to do the paperwork and then up the elevator. When they came to the case-room doors the nurse pointed him down the hall to an alcove of brown plastic chairs and then she pushed Margaret through the doors quickly, robbing him of the chance to say one last encouraging word to Margaret’s back.

  They put Margaret out right after the delivery. An hour later Bill was allowed into her room but she wasn’t conscious, didn’t know he had kissed her forehead. They told Bill his second daughter appeared to be a bit early but was fine and that Margaret’s uterus was in shock, a common enough reaction with such a fast delivery. Outside Margaret’s room, a nurse wheeled the baby down the corridor and let him look at her for maybe two minutes and then she left him standing there alone. On her way back to the nursery she turned around and said, “You might as well be on your way. Your wife will need her rest.”

  He drove the thirty miles home just before dawn. The wet snow was thicker on the windshield and the traffic had picked up so he was forced to take it slow.

  When he walked into the kitchen Daphne and Paul were waiting at the table with a pot of coffee ready for him on the stove. “A girl,” he told them. “And Margaret’s all right. She did fine.” He said Margaret was sleeping now, that they’d decided to put
her to sleep because it had been extremely fast. “It was very, very fast,” he said. In answer to Daphne’s questions, he said he had no idea how much their sister weighed, all he could say was that she was tiny, a real little runt, and he couldn’t say either if she looked like anyone or when they might come home. After only a few sips of coffee he stood to go upstairs to get ready for work. “I’ll come home at noon,” he called back from the stairs, “and we’ll go back in together.”

  Daphne called Patrick and Murray in London and got them out of bed. She talked to each of them, said the same things twice. “It’s a girl and Margaret came through with flying colours. She’s absolutely fine. It’s sister Sally.”

  Margaret’s uterus gradually came out of shock and when she woke up, alone, she ran her hands over her sore, softened stomach and then up over her breasts, which in the last few months had become ridiculously large and which were now aching and hard as melons.

  They fed Sally sugar water in the nursery and brought her to Margaret several times a day to try to take the breast, one nurse staying with them always, even after Margaret told her that it might be better if they were on their own. By the second day Sally had caught on and the nurse finally left them in peace. Bill had brought Daphne and Paul in that first day to look at their sister through the nursery window and the boys drove down from London, coming awkwardly into the quiet of Margaret’s room in their coats and boots. After four days of it, Margaret told Bill she wanted out, as soon as possible, yesterday.

  When Margaret brought Sally home everyone was ready to hold her, she was never down. Bill called her the Christmas present. After the boys got the tree up and decorated, Daphne wrapped Sally’s squirming naked body in a red ribbon and carefully tucked her in among the other presents for a picture. Margaret leaned against the living-room arch and watched Daphne do this not because she was even slightly worried about Sally in Daphne’s beautiful hands but because before Sally joined them she had not once seen Daphne reach to touch anyone, man or beast.