All Saints

by K. D. Miller

  Their bed, which now doubled as a couch, took up most of the adjoining bed-sitting room. But there was space enough left over for the perfectly good armchair they found on the street and carried home one garbage day, and a corner for the tiny tree they decorated at Christmas.

  Dave got taken on full-time at the music store while they were living on Alma Street. Emily finished her second year at university, started her third and began thinking about maybe grad school. Or maybe not. Sometimes in the middle of a class she would picture their two little rooms in her mind and have to stop herself from gathering up her books and leaving and going home to them.

  She liked to imagine showing her mother around the place. The two of them were talking on the phone again, but if Dave took the call all he would hear was, “May I please speak to my daughter?” Emily was sure that if she could show her mother their kitchen, her face would soften at the sight and she would start telling stories about the things she had managed to make do with when she and Emily’s father were just starting out.

  The brightness of that first small kitchen, its fresh yellow paint and dark red floor tiles, stirred something in Emily every time she turned the key and opened the door. She cleaned it and cleaned it like a cat, never allowing a drop of coffee to dry on the counter or a cup to sit unwashed in the sink.

  Their rent is due. Their rent is overdue. Twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars they don’t have. Her student loan is all used up and she won’t get the grant portion till next term and it’s four days till Dave gets paid. He’s had to go to Rick and ask him to let them off for this month. And maybe next month too. They have just enough food to last till payday. If they run out of milk or bread, Em will have to go to Cass and ask if they can share.

  “Something’ll turn up, Babe,” Dave says. “Just stop worrying and try to relax.”

  She can’t stop worrying. She can’t relax. And she can’t understand how he can. How he can go on playing his harp and bickering with Rick and whistling while he’s tying shoelaces that have broken and been knotted and then broken again.

  Her worries follow her. Surround her. Fill her up. She’s late for class because she has to hitchhike up to the campus because the bus is twenty-five cents. She worries all through the lecture, her pen stalled at the top of a blank page. She can barely smile when Dave clowns for her, trying to make her laugh. In bed she lies under him unmoving and unmoved, mentally adding up dollars that are forever short of what they need.

  Over the Christmas holidays, when Rick and Cass both leave to visit their families, Em and Dave get into the habit of staying up half the night watching TV, then sleeping in the next day till one or two in the afternoon. They wake to a grey day that fades to a deeper dusk then blackens into night. For hours until they go to bed, the TV screen is their only light. They watch old movies together, imagining themselves as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or Nick and Nora Charles. Inexplicably rich. Ridiculously carefree.

  On Christmas Day, Em takes the coins she has saved up one by one and plinks them one by one into the slot of a payphone. She listens just long enough to hear her mother say, “Hello? Hello? Hello!” before hanging up. That night in front of the TV she falls asleep beside Dave on the couch in the middle of the movie. She wakes to find herself being walked tenderly down the basement stairs to their room. Dave murmuring in her ear about how he’ll take off her clothes and put her to bed and cover her warm.

  “I want a bedroom I don’t have to entertain my guests in. I want a dining room. With a real dining-room table in it. And I want to take a crap in my own bathroom without my neighbours banging on the door.”

  Dave had been talking this way for months, slapping his palm down on the card table in the kitchen. Emily loved his mock outrage, his easy rhetoric. Loved being able to afford it. She couldn’t get used to having enough money. A little more than enough.

  She and Dave were going for long walks together on the weekends, exploring neighbourhoods, taking down phone numbers from FOR RENT signs. Stopping somewhere in the middle of the afternoon to compare notes over coffee and a croissant. Emily always lingered over hers, moistening a finger and picking up crumbs from her plate. Looking forward to the sight of Dave casually flipping open his wallet to settle the bill and leave a tip.

  “We’re not students any more. So why are we living like students? Look at us. We don’t even look like students.”

  Emily’s hair was newly cut in a 1920s bob. She had started painting her fingernails a dark red and wearing eye shadow and foundation and blush. She had finished her degree, decided against grad school and taken a part-time job in a library that left her mornings free for writing. She had completed four poems and two short stories, and had started sending them out to magazines.

  Dave had shortened his own hair to jaw length and trimmed his beard into a neat goatee. His sales had gone up. He was becoming known to their friends as a sound-system expert, advising them about upgrades and inviting them to come down to the store so he could cut them a deal.

  One Friday afternoon, he phoned Emily at the library to tell her he had been promoted to assistant manager. That weekend while they were out walking, they found a real apartment in a real apartment building on a tree-lined avenue off Granville.

  If there was ever a Golden Age of Emily and Dave, Emily will decide, it would have to be when they were living in that place off Granville. Bluebirds used to nest in the trees outside their bedroom window, for God’s sake. And remember the way the venetian blinds sliced the afternoon sun into bright stripes along the living-room floor? And the way the handles of their two umbrellas, in that white ceramic stand by the door, used to lean away from each other to form a heart?

  They started subscribing to The New Yorker while they were there, trading the latest issue back and forth and posting their favourite cartoons on the refrigerator door. They developed a taste for Art Deco and did the whole place over in black and white—a black and white striped couch, a white dining-room table, black chairs, black frames for the old movie posters on the white walls. They taught each other about gourmet foods and fancy drinks. Together, they cooked expensive, complicated meals full of ingredients their mothers had never heard of and served them to their friends.

  Friends. They discovered they had a talent for friendship. They made friends with everybody. Their workmates. Their neighbours. People who waited on them in stores. “I met somebody today I think you’ll like … ” became a dinnertime mantra.

  Whenever they were giving a dinner party, there would come a moment after everybody was sitting down and eating and the clatter of cutlery and the clamor of talk was starting to rise. Emily would catch Dave’s eye, or he would catch hers, and they would silently toast each other. Look at us. All grown up.

  Rick has started going out while Cass is at work, then arriving back at the runt house minutes before she’s due to walk through the door. Not looking at Em, he tells Dave about this chick he’s just been with—this absolutely gorgeous, fantastic chick. Then, winking, he says, “Hey. Not a word about this to Cass, right?”

  Later that night, they hear Cass taking in her twelve orgasmic gulps of air. “Don’t worry about it, Babe,” Dave says, seeing the look on Em’s face. “Rick’s always been an asshole when it comes to women.”

  Then how can you be his friend? Em wants to say, but doesn’t. She should be asking Cass that question, except it’s none of her business.

  Don’t fall in love. Does Cass take her own advice? Does she just get whatever she can get out of Rick—a good time with no strings attached? But how do you do that? How do you open yourself to a man night after night, take him inside, feel your skin dissolving into his, wake up every morning smelling of him, and still stay cool and apart and able to walk away any time?

  Sometimes at night Em hears Rick and Cass laughing together behind their closed bedroom door. She wonders if Rick is telling Cass the same old stories that she
hears from Dave. She wonders if Cass does the same thing she does with them afterwards. First forgive them, then file them in a place called Then. A place that has nothing to do with Now.

  What is it about Thursday? Emily was working fast, flashing her automatic smile at each borrower. The whole world decides it just has to come to the library on Thursday. She was sliding the next stack of books toward the humming checkout machine when she noticed they were all about clothing design and fabric painting and decorative bead work. Don’t glance up, she warned herself, just before glancing up.

  “Hi.” Cass looked nervous. “I didn’t know you worked here. And then when I saw it was you, I wasn’t sure if I should—”

  “It’s okay,” Emily said evenly. And it was. Well, it should be. It had been almost three years. She had wondered what it would be like to run into Rick or Cass. If she had seen Rick, she would have ducked behind something. But she had never had anything against Cass. Not really.

  “I’m off in half an hour,” she said, checking out Cass’s books. “We could go for tea, if you like.”

  Over tea, Cass told her that she had quit the fabric outlet ages ago. Now she was teamed up with two other women, and they were starting a business together. They were going to make and sell one-of-a-kind outfits geared to women just like them—under forty, fashion-savvy, feminist. They were looking at a property in Gastown. Sure, the rent was steep, but that was where their target clientele went to shop.

  Emily assumed that what Cass was wearing was the kind of thing she would sell. Flared jeans, a Laura Ashley print smock and a denim vest decked with sequins and feathers and swatches of velvet and brocade. The bangles were gone from her wrists, but the big hoops still swayed from her ears. She had let her hair go grey, and had that frizzy fin-de-siècle perm that everybody was getting. Everybody except Emily, who kept the 20s bob because it was easy and it suited her. She had on her pink-striped cotton blouse that day, and her navy skirt. The library insisted on skirts and dresses for its female staff. But at least her blouse wasn’t nylon. None of her blouses were. Not any more. She considered telling Cass this, then almost blushed at the thought of how feeble it would sound.

  “So,” Cass said carefully, shaking her spoon over her cup and putting it into the saucer. “You and Dave are—”

  “Still together. Getting married, as a matter of fact.”

  “You’re kidding! When?”

  “We haven’t set a date. It’ll be after we move east. There’s a new store going up in Toronto. They want him to manage it. And maybe a couple of others too. In time.”

  Cass was shaking her head and grinning. “Wow. You guys. I used to give you six weeks, max. What with Dave’s track record. Oh. Sorry. That was a bit—”

  “It’s all right,” Emily said, then made herself smile. Same old Cass.

  So were they going to buy a house? Have kids? Cass asked all the right questions, but Emily could tell it was a polite act. She knew her plans were as unfashionable as her clothes. The papers and magazines were full of angry articles by angry women referring to marriage as prostitution and women like herself as Uncle Toms.

  “I’m really glad to hear you guys are okay,” Cass was saying. “Especially after—” She looked at Emily. “I was worried about you.”

  “We’re fine now,” Emily said quickly, looking away.

  And they were. And she was proud of Dave, damn it. Proud of how far he had come. How great he looked setting off for work each day in his designer jeans and Oxford-cloth shirt and tie. (“Gotta be able to sell to either generation, Mama. Oops. Emily.”) She loved lying in bed in the mornings half-awake, sleepily aware of him standing and looking down at her, doing up his cuffs. He was collecting vintage cuff links that he found in antique stores. She was always at her desk by the time he was ready to leave. He pointed at her, raised an eyebrow and said, “Write me a Pulitzer.”

  “But I’m still glad we ran into each other,” Cass was going on. “Because you just kind of disappeared. And I always wanted to talk to you. Tell you how sorry I was. About—That I didn’t do anything for you, I mean. That day.”

  “There’s nothing you could have done.” Emily did not want to discuss this. Anybody else would have picked up on that. But not Cass.

  “It was just so weird. Like, I thought I knew Liz. I never thought she’d—And I never knew Dave was—If I had, I’d have told you. Promise. But all of a sudden Liz just barges in the door and pushes past me and goes charging down the basement stairs and then I hear yelling and what sounds like a fight and I just stand there thinking, What do I do? Do I go down there and try to break it up? Rick had just stepped out, or else he could have—”

  “How is Rick?” Emily couldn’t believe she was asking. But she had to change the subject.

  “Rick?” Cass blew through her lips. “I don’t even know where Rick is, and I don’t care. You know what happened? A week after you two left? Marples came back from the dead.”

  “Marples? Garth Marples?” The man Emily had never seen, but whose smell she could conjure up in an instant, having spent an hour with her face buried in his pillow.

  “The one and only. Fresh from the morgue. With his hospital bracelet still on his wrist. Hollering at us, calling us Goddamned hippies and giving us half an hour to get out of his house before he called the cops. First thing in the morning. I’m in my nightie. And in thirty minutes I’m going to be out on the street with no place to go. Hell of a way to start the day.”

  “But Rick said—”

  “Rick was full of shit. As usual. This was another one of his dumb-assed schemes. He wasn’t supposed to live in that house. And he sure as hell wasn’t supposed to let his friends move in. All he was supposed to do was keep an eye on the place and cut the grass. And he couldn’t even do that.”

  Emily nodded, remembering the field of weeds in front of the runt house. “So what happened?”

  “What happened to me was, I got taken in by the two friends I’m starting the business with. And I have to tell you. Getting thrown out of that house was my click. You know about click, don’t you? When you’re picking up some guy’s dirty socks and something goes click in your brain and you think, Hey. I’m just as smart as he is. And I work just as hard as he does. So how come I’m picking up his dirty socks? Well, that’s what happened to me when Marples came back and threw us out and it turned out that Rick had been lying to me. Again.”

  “So you just walked away from Rick?”

  It was so strange to be saying that name. Asking about him. Rick was a taboo subject between her and Dave. She herself had declared it taboo, that day in the runt house when she listed her conditions. Some of them were easy, like him calling her Emily instead of Em or Mama or Babe. Others were harder, like him having nothing to do with Rick, ever again.

  All this time, whenever she had allowed herself to think about Rick, she had pictured him still living in the runt house with Cass. Which would have made Garth Marples either dead or in the hospital, dying. Now that picture had just been ripped into a million tiny pieces. Like the photograph the old soldier rips up. In those fragments of—what? A poem? A play? Fragments she wrote down just after she and Dave moved out of the runt house. They never grew into anything, those strange scribbled bits. But she kept them.

  “No,” Cass was saying. “I didn’t just walk away from Rick.” She looked down at her tea. “He walked away from me.” She looked back up at Emily. “We’d been making love, right? That morning. That’s what Marples walked in on. So I’m still wet from Rick when we’re standing out on the sidewalk with our stuff in garbage bags. And I’m crying and asking him what we’re going to do now. Well Cass, he says. We both knew it wasn’t going to last, didn’t we? And I don’t get it. I’m going, What? That what wasn’t going to last? Living here, you mean? So that’s when he tells me. There’s somebody else. There’s been somebody else for weeks. Some chick he’s be
en balling the whole time. Right under my nose. While we were all in that house together. And now he’s going to go stay with her. So I’m on my own. And then he picks up the bags that have his stuff in them and he walks away from me. And I just stand there on the sidewalk. Watching him—Shit. Oh, shit.”

  Emily searched her purse for a Kleenex. Cass’s tears shocked her. But so did the way they made her feel oddly vindicated.

  “Sorry,” Cass said, wiping her eyes. “That fucker doesn’t deserve this.”

  Emily arranged her face into a mask of concern. Hoped what she was really thinking didn’t show. Score one for Uncle Tom. And so much for click.

  “I just want to know one thing.” Cass’s nose is red, her face splotchy and old. Won’t be able to sell to the under-forties for long, Emily could imagine Dave saying. “What I want to know is, did you and Dave know? About Rick cheating on me, I mean. When we all lived together. Did you know? You can tell me. I won’t be mad. Just tell me.”

  Emily hesitated. What good would it do to tell Cass the truth now, after all this time? Besides. Garth Marples was alive. And so were those fragments on those yellowing sheets of paper in her three-ring binder. She wanted to end this conversation. Get home. Get writing.

  “No,” she said at last, looking down into her cup. “We didn’t know. She wished her hair was still long. She could feel the blood rising in her cheeks. She hoped Cass would think it was just the hot tea.

  As soon as she got home that day, Emily would start writing a story called Barney. It would be about a man building a room in his basement. Building it up on a platform for the damp, and painting it military green as a joke. A joke between him and his old war buddy. Who has no place to go. Who’s living at the God damned Y. With a roommate who smells. And all because his wife threw him out. Wives. Jesus. His own is up in the kitchen. Cooking her mad into his supper. He can smell it. He’ll taste it soon. Well, he’s got his own mad. And he can hammer it, he can. Loud. Nail by nail. Barney is his friend. Friend. Can’t the woman get that into her head?