That Time I Loved You

by That Time I Loved You- Stories (retail) (epub)

  Marilyn was acutely aware of the thrill that thieving gave her from the first time she took a tube of lipstick from the purse of her beautiful best friend, Lucille, when she was sixteen. She remembered being fixated on the pink tube edged in gold. The colour was called Lilac Memory. It was a ghastly shade on her friend and yet Lucille treated the lipstick like it was a magical wand. Lucille was the kind of beautiful that the ugly lilac enhanced. It made people pause to look even longer at her and ponder that even with that clash of colour, Lucille was a riotous beauty. Marilyn was, as she would be her entire life, merely a sidekick. Her friends were always the prettier, the funnier, the smarter, the more interesting. And when she was alone, no one noticed her at all despite her height.

  Marilyn found that for weeks before she took the lipstick, she was always aware of where it was, painfully attentive to Lucille’s careful application of the garish purple on her lips and the return of it to her purse’s inside zippered pocket. Several times a day, this act was repeated, and so were Marilyn’s tense observations. When she finally reached into Lucille’s purse and snatched the lipstick, the pounding of her heart, the sheen of sweat that glazed her body lightly and even the sharpening of her vision were delicious, revelatory. She imagined it was as close to feeling like God as she ever could. And so, she continued.

  There was always a touch of regret when people noticed what was missing. That first time, Marilyn chewed her nails to the quick as she watched her best friend tear apart her own bedroom in search of that favoured lipstick. The guilt was fleeting. Marilyn found that she was able to inhabit the excitement of the act again and again when she pulled the terrible purple across her own lips or cupped the weight of the tube in her hand. Besides, Lucille had more than enough going for her. She didn’t need the lipstick too.

  The joy of the conquest and the revelling in her trove never let her down. She perhaps caused some momentary irritation, but real, permanent harm? Never. Most people had too much stuff anyway. Her pleasure, she reasoned, greatly outweighed the crime. Besides, Marilyn knew she was a very good person, and she worked harder to be one. Meanwhile, her collection of pilfered objects grew, and she stored them in hidden boxes under her bed.

  As one of the first people to move into the new subdivision, Marilyn tried to make an impression right away. When other people arrived, she made it her job to welcome them. Her husband, James, was her skinny shadow, following her around with a jovial smile to match hers but with fewer words. Together, laden with paper plates of home-baked cookies wrapped in plastic, they would walk across the dirt lawns, not yet covered by turf.

  It was a contradiction, perhaps, given her predilections, but Marilyn thought of herself as a very generous person. She carried herself regally, not stooping her shoulders like other women her age. She was large but not fat. Thick, she would say. She was a formidable figure, and the neighbours quickly succumbed to her sense of purpose and friendliness. When she and James introduced themselves to each new household with the vivacity of teenage counsellors on the first day of summer camp, her sharp eye caught all the details of the neighbours’ belongings.

  It only took seconds for Marilyn to assess what she wanted. A small ballerina figurine placed not in the centre of the display cabinet but on the edge like an afterthought. A copper watering can on the kitchen counter. A chipped blue coffee mug left on the porch. It was the little-ness or the copper-ness or the blue-ness of these objects that spoke to her. They had animal qualities, these objects. Marilyn didn’t think it was so much her stealing them but their calling to her. She would make silent promises and bide her time.

  She and James had moved from downtown and were happy to be in Scarborough and its relative quiet. Both of them were recently retired accountants looking for a place to settle into their twilight years. She loved the neighbourhood’s newness. Their two-bedroom bungalow smelled like fresh sawdust and varnish, and the street was stirring with spindly new trees and young families. She always had a biscuit ready to hand to a teething toddler out on a stroll with their parents. This easy generosity made her one of the most popular people on the block, the one whom neighbours went to when they needed to borrow a ladder or a cup of sugar, or to get advice on cooking a roast. And Marilyn was more than willing to preside over the street as its matriarch.

  “Marilyn is a treasure,” the neighbours would say.

  When Mrs. Da Silva died, it was Marilyn who coordinated the efforts to be neighbourly. She went door to door and solicited casseroles from everyone to deliver to Mr. Da Silva and the poor boy, George. For those who hadn’t yet heard, she was happy to be the messenger of the grim news.

  “That poor Mrs. Da Silva. It was suicide.” Marilyn would deliver the last word in a whisper, her hand floating to her heart. “We all knew she hadn’t been quite right, but I never thought it would come to this.” Marilyn would pause to let the news sink in while she looked up to the sky, the barest hint of tears gathering in her eyes. “Now, let’s show our support in this moment of grief. They will need things, so if you can cook up something that can be frozen, that would be best.”

  “Oh, Marilyn. Thank you. You are so good. So kind.” One after another, the neighbours praised her, feeling such gratitude for their Marilyn.

  The day after drumming up edibles for the remaining Da Silvas, Marilyn, followed by a group of women on the street, delivered armloads of Corningware to the Da Silvas’ door. Marilyn rang the bell while the other ladies waited on the porch.

  Mr. Da Silva opened the door in his undershirt, his face heavy with fatigue. “Mr. Da Silva, we are so, so sorry to hear the news of your wife’s death. We all liked Mrs. Da Silva very much.” Marilyn scrunched up her face in an effort to be sorrowful. The women behind her nodded like a cluster of macaws. Mr. Da Silva stared dumbly at them.

  “Mr. Da Silva,” Marilyn tried again, “the ladies and I have brought food for you for the days ahead.” She raised the platter in her arms as if to say, See?

  Mr. Da Silva grunted and moved aside for the women to enter. They couldn’t all fit into the hallway of the house, so like an assembly line, they passed the platters forward from hall to kitchen to Marilyn, who then neatly stacked them in the freezer. “There, Mr. Da Silva. All done!” She clapped her hands together. When he didn’t move to say thank you, she awkwardly patted his back and said, “Let us know if there is anything we can do . . .”

  As soon as he and the other women turned around to move toward the front door, she slipped a pair of scissors that had been on the top of the fridge into her apron pocket. After they filed out, Mr. Da Silva shut the door behind them without even a thank you.

  As they walked away, Marilyn shook her head and brightly remarked, “Oh well. Wasn’t it the Bible that said love thy neighbour?”

  “I guess God hadn’t met Mr. Da Silva,” said Janine Bevis. The others chuckled guiltily. Mr. Da Silva was indeed very hard to love. Later that evening, Marilyn took out the clothespins that she had stolen from the Da Silva garage last winter and said a silent prayer for Mrs. Da Silva and even the teenager George, who she thought looked like a thug. The clothespins were cheap wooden things, cracked from use. She remembered walking by the Da Silva house one day and, out of curiosity and because the garage door was open, going inside. The clothesline was hanging across it, and pinned neatly on one end was a pretty silk sack. It was bright pink, standing out like a flower against the greyness inside the garage. She had reached into the bag and found these clothespins. Marilyn had thought it was ridiculous that someone would use the refined bag to hold such a stupid thing as old clothespins. But instead of the sack, she pocketed the pins. She didn’t know why. She stole by instinct and not reason. There was something about the pins—they were plain but had a vibrancy, a liveliness that was in common with everything else she stole.

  After Mr. Finley’s, Mrs. Da Silva’s and Mr. Lems’s death, she rallied the younger people around her at her and James’s regular cocktail parties. “Things get bad sometimes. Rocky roads a
re certainly ahead. But they’re part of life. Don’t we know it, James?” She would nod in James’s direction, and he would answer obligingly, his voice thin and as chirpy as his wife’s. The neighbours were baffled and saddened, but their lives weren’t greatly disrupted. The dead were not people who got invited to the parties. Still, Marilyn’s words pronounced everything that was important to them—family, a home and the spray of sprinklers on grass. Marilyn gently steered them away from the rupture of these deaths and back to safe ground.

  “Hold on to each other. That’s what will get us through the storms. I don’t know why our poor neighbours took the matter in their own hands. I am not judging. Let’s hold on to all the good in moments like this. They too will pass.” She lifted her Tom Collins and said, “Amen,” and all her guests tilted their drinks to their lips after murmuring “Amen.”

  The suicides caused a bigger agitation inside Marilyn than anyone would have guessed, making her itch to steal more—random things, things that she didn’t even want. Instead of adoring them or neatly storing them as she once did, she would cast these objects on the floor of her hobby room with disgust. The more she teetered, the more determined she was to be helpful.

  She had got together with James later in life at the plastics company where they both worked in the finance department. She was accounts payable, and James was accounts receivable.Marilyn had grown used to him as a silent man. Days would pass with nothing more than a mention about the weather. Still, Marilyn always placed a cup of hot coffee on his desk at exactly 9:30 a.m. He liked his coffee with two sugars and no milk. After a decade of sitting across from each other, James told her out of the blue that his wife had left him. Marilyn had long committed herself to a life of spinsterhood. She was the one who everybody could rely on to bring the doughnuts in the morning or work overtime while her co-workers had to run home to family dinners. There was something about the way the quiet man looked across at her and announced that his beloved Margaret, the wife who had been packing his ham sandwiches all these years, had left him that made Marilyn see a window.

  Being married to the passive James gave her a sense of calm that she had not known she was missing. Marilyn bloomed. She went from a dowdy wardrobe of white polyester shirts, black skirts and sensible heels to colourful floral pantsuits and sparkly sweaters. She permed her straight lank hair into a frizzy halo around her face. Marilyn even learned to dance, watching Disco Fever on television to study some of the moves and making James stand up from his La-Z-Boy to twirl her.

  James was a sweetheart, she often told him. He was an easy man, and while he had few words, she made up for it with her cheerful chatter. Marilyn was over the moon when she coaxed a smile from him. She blushed from head to toe and felt like a young girl. She made sure James needed her, taking over anything that required attention—the chores, household finances, the bedroom. For a while, early in their marriage, she even forgot to steal.

  Moving here changed that, and she found herself once again on the hunt. Objects beckoned to her from the lawns and living rooms of her neighbours’ homes. Maybe it was all the newness, the shiny people. Whatever it was, the neighbourhood gleamed like a field of gems ready to be snatched. Initially, she worried about James finding out, but he seemed fine with accepting the surface of who Marilyn was—a fine woman and wife who made his life comfortable. As long as James seemed content, Marilyn was satisfied.

  Most days, Marilyn observed the neighbours from the large picture window in her front room like a mother hawk, her hand always in motion, waving hello and goodbye as people came and went from their homes. Over morning coffee, she would gaze out to the street and speak to James about what she saw.

  “James, it’s like the United Nations out there! The Portuguese and Italians. And all those Chinese kids. I thought they were supposed to be well behaved, the Chinese. I expect this from the Portuguese and Italians, but the Chinese? They’re wild animals! They’re known to breed, aren’t they?”

  Marilyn would shake her head while James chuckled.

  There was one kid in particular who made her skin crawl: little June Lee, who came from polite-enough parents, from the limited interactions Marilyn had had with them. But there was something about the way June looked at her, staring at her like she knew things. When Marilyn would step out of her house to collect the mail or shovel the walk, that child seemed to follow her with those small eyes, even in the middle of her childish games. It gave Marilyn the feeling that invisible flies were trying to land on her head.

  Secretly, she loathed kids, all kids and not just the Chinese ones on the street. She pretended to coo at the babies, but she was happy she didn’t have any. She felt sorry for the Italian girl, Francesca Marino. She saw how Francesca’s eyes grew misty when a new baby was paraded around the street. Marilyn felt like taking Francesca aside and telling her the truth: kids were shit and seemed nothing but heartache. But the Italians, Marilyn knew, were more like the Chinese than you think. They loved to procreate like they were going to run out of people or something.

  James’s grown kids stayed away, probably feeling a sense of betrayal that he and Marilyn had married so shortly after their parents’ divorce. Marilyn knew James minded, but if he suffered, he did so silently, like he did all things. And if those children were angry, they also stayed silent like their father. Anyway, who did these terrible children think made their father breakfast, lunch and dinner every day? Washed his stinking socks and stained underwear? Kept the poor man company when he otherwise would not utter a word? Meanwhile, their mother was taking road trips across the country and whooping it up. Really, who should be mad at whom?

  Marilyn hid her hoard in the spare bedroom. She called it her hobby room. Marilyn forbade James from ever entering, and James, like always in his life, did as he was told. He assumed it was where Marilyn did all her bedazzling. She was crazy for all that was rhinestones, beads and sequins. All her clothes were embellished with the sparkle, and she offered her services to the whole neighbourhood. For a season, many of the women wore their jeans with bejewelled back pockets.

  Unlike the rest of the house, which was orderly and neat as a pin, the hobby room looked like a pirate’s treasure cache. Her collection had outgrown the boxes. The newest acquisitions sat on top of the pile while older ones peeped from under the heap. Marilyn liked to spend mid-afternoons here, clearing a spot to sit in the middle of the floor, surrounded by her things. The room and its objects gathered dust that floated sweetly in the air when stirred, surrounding Marilyn like an aura.

  One fall day shortly after Janine Bevis’s suicide, Marilyn stepped on the highest rung of her kitchen stepladder to get a pan from the top cabinet, lost her footing and fell. She had been feeling shaky since hearing the news. Janine had been a regular at her parties and a loyal follower of Marilyn.

  All morning, Marilyn had sat with a pad of paper and pen, trying to summon a good speech to rally her neighbours to higher spirits and meaning, but the words sounded hollow. All she wanted to do was leave her house, walk into all the unlocked doors of the neighbourhood and take. Instead, she tried to distract herself by thinking of the kind of casse-role to make for Mr. Bevis and his kids.

  The spill startled her, and she didn’t make a sound until she was splayed on the floor and a sharp pain in her shin overtook her. “Ow?” she asked in stunned surprise.

  At the hospital, the doctor determined it was a proximal tibia fracture. There was talk of surgery, sliding nails, screws and a cast. By now, the pain was fierce and she thought she’d die from it. She graciously asked the nurse for something and was granted an injection of clear liquid. Soon she felt quite comfortable in her hospital bed while James fussed and worried.

  “James! My goodness, you’re making me dizzy, and I am feeling very fine now. You trust the nice doctors. They’ll put me back together in no time.”

  The doctors and nurses did treat her fine. They treated her like a queen, in fact. Marilyn learned their names, their kids’ names a
nd their favourite kind of cookie. “You wait until I get out of here!” she crowed at her orthopaedic surgeon. “I am going to make you the best darn chocolate chip cookie you have ever tasted!” He glowed from her attention.

  Back in the neighbourhood, news spread of Marilyn’s fall, and the stay-at-home moms spun into action. Their Marilyn was always there for them, and they were determined to be there for her. They instructed James to stay with Marilyn at the hospital while they took care of the rest. One team started cooking up the casseroles. Another mowed the front lawn and weeded the flower garden. Yet another team decided to surprise James and Marilyn and clean their house.

  Nobody locked their front doors. Neighbourhood Watch stickers were posted in each of their front windows like badges of honour. Their neighbourhood had not been blemished by a single criminal activity save for the occasional missing items that must have been misplaced rather than stolen. And so, the third team, armed with buckets, J Cloths and cleaning agents, let themselves into Marilyn and James’s house. The house was in good shape, but the women thought they would give it a once-over anyway, to show Marilyn that they cared.

  One of them found the vacuum cleaner and got started on making perfect V tracks in the living room. Another aimed for the powder room because she was a believer that the toilet should always be the first thing taken care of. Francesca took the back, passing by the master bedroom first and glancing at the queen-sized bed, the letters J and M bedazzled on the duvet.

  Francesca walked toward the other room. Its door was closed. She remembered Marilyn mentioning that she had a hobby room where she made her sparkling creations. Marilyn had gifted her a set of jewelled placemats once. Francesca eased the door open.

  A few days after her surgery, Marilyn was sitting in her bed, watching her soap opera, All My Children, propped up with pillows that the nurse named Alice would plump up every half-hour. James entered and sat down, handing Marilyn her favourite jelly-filled doughnut and a coffee from Constellation Doughnuts.