Duet for Three

by Joan Barfoot

  But June’s eighth birthday party is something different. Half a century ago and there it is, real as yesterday; more real in a way, since it made things clear, whereas yesterday did not.

  “You’re getting all grown up, aren’t you?” her father said one evening. “Pretty soon you’ll be eight years old,” and he looked almost sad. She nearly said, “No, I won’t grow up for a long time,” so that he wouldn’t sound sad; the same way she never told him she didn’t believe in Santa Claus any more, because it seemed it would hurt him. Her mother might say, “Eat up, June, we have to get some meat on your bones,” but her own desire was to stay small.

  He smiled. “How would you like a birthday party? You could have, say, eight friends, one for each year, and whatever food you want, and games and paper hats.”

  That was one of the things she loved about him: that he opened up such visions, possibilities.

  “I could have anything?”

  “Whatever you want. Just this once.”

  She wanted hot dogs and soda pop, chocolate cake and ice cream.

  This was during the depression. She didn’t understand at the time all that meant, but she did know that even though her father had a proper job, extra care was being taken. When she went shopping with Aggie on Saturdays, she saw her studying the meat longer than usual, and buying cheaper cuts. Sometimes fruit was passed over, and when her mother baked, she used less sugar. The garden was expanded. Among June’s friends, even those who had been prosperous, clothes lasted longer, there were more hand-me-downs, and lunches were more often tomato sandwiches than meat. There were rumors, whispered talk, of some families in trouble. A birthday party was a luxury.

  Aggie was quick, of course, to point that out. She said a party would be frivolous, unnecessary. Her father, though, said, “Every child should have one, and this is as good a time as any.” He and June designed the paper hats she wanted. Her mother would buy the tissue and make them. June’s would be tall and blue, with a glued-on golden star.

  He went out and bought material for a birthday dress. Pink taffeta. Taffeta! June touched it with wonder. It was slithery and crackly, glamorous and grown-up. “I thought you’d like it,” he said.

  “Taffeta!” Aggie cried. “For God’s sake, do you have any idea how hard that stuff is to sew?” But while she threw up her hands and rolled her eyes and sighed and complained, he just stood quietly looking at her, holding out the material.

  For what felt like hours, June stood rigid on a chair while her mother knelt, pins clutched in her teeth, adjusting seams and putting up the hem. Aggie bent over the sewing, the material slipping beneath her fingers, whispering small curses. “Damn,” June heard. “Oh, damn.”

  Still, with whatever resentment the dress was made, every stitch ended up in place and each fold fell perfectly. June twirled in front of the mirror in her room, a vision of stiff pink, the tight bodice flaring into skirt, the matching bow splendid at the waist. When she wore it downstairs to show her father, he said, “Oh, that’s nice, bunny. Say thank you to your mother.”

  At school there was a certain competition for her invitations, whispers of who would be going and who would not. Because she was liked, or because she was the teacher’s daughter, or because, in such hard times, a party was so rare? The reason didn’t matter. What mattered was to be the centre of attention.

  She saw herself at the party, perfect in pink taffeta, graciously accepting gifts, nodding at her guests, distributing hot dogs and cake. “Would you care for more?” she would ask politely. “Oh, thank you, do you like my dress?” and “What a lovely gift, how kind.” She rehearsed in her bedroom at night. “So glad you could come,” she said, nodding to invisible guests. “How nice.”

  Aggie made the crinkly paper hats and bought the food. The day before the party, she set up games in the front room. On a piece of cardboard, she sketched a crude, cartoon sort of donkey and cut it out, and from another piece of cardboard she fashioned a long, full, drooping tail. She colored it purple with one of June’s crayons. June worried about it a little: that her friends would laugh at it for the wrong reasons. Also, that they might laugh at Aggie herself, already overweight and somewhat sloppy.

  But at the party there was Aggie, patting one girl on the head, putting an arm around another, distributing affection easily, even taking part in the games, letting herself be blindfolded and turned by the small hands of June’s friends and laughing when she saw she’d pinned the donkey’s tail to its ear. “Your mother’s fun,” whispered a little girl. She was fun, too; just not anyone June recognized.

  Her father, on the other hand, stayed mainly in the background. He smiled and spoke kindly but didn’t join in, did not appear as the joyful man she knew. Of course, though, he was the teacher and these friends of hers were his pupils. A certain distance had to be maintained.

  The house grew warm, the taffeta got a little limp, and she forgot to be quite as gracious all the time as she’d intended. The gifts, beyond the glittering paper, were something of a disappointment after all — a handkerchief here, a little cloth doll there. It was difficult to be enthusiastic.

  Still, the party itself was a success. She imagined her friends talking about it the next day at school, laughing about how good the games were, how lavish the food had been, boasting about it loudly, in front of those who had not been asked. Aggie, with her own taste for sweets, had made a luxurious cake: dark chocolate layers separated by date filling and slathered with chocolate icing. Inside were little prizes, charms and coins — a special, extra touch. Ice cream was also to be served.

  Eight candles were burning when Aggie carried the cake in from the kitchen. “Make a wish,” her father said.

  (What did she wish for then? Probably something silly, like good marks. What she would wish for now would be colossal. She might wish to be loved. But now she’s too old to believe in wishes. Now she prays, and the only love to be prayed for is God’s.)

  Aggie, at her end of the table, began to cut the cake, topping each slice with ice cream, and passing it around. The girls’ high spirits bubbled over into hysteria. Hot and over-excited, they began giggling, snorting and poking at each other; June, too. This was the best part. No one would forget this pure shared joy.

  Disasters always seem to happen in slow motion. There was June, bent over laughing as a plate arrived in her hands at the same moment the girl beside her nudged her. The plate slipped, the cake swept into the air, separating from the ice cream, and went plunging into her lap while the ice cream slapped across her chest.

  She watched it all happening, amazed.

  Chocolate stains slithered down her body, and there was a little plopping sound as the ice cream hit the floor. Suddenly no one was laughing. There were little gasps and sucked-in breaths. June stared at the disaster of pink taffeta, so carefully and unwillingly stitched over so many hours. She could not believe this. In a moment it would go away, she was sure; it was something like a nightmare, but she’d wake up.

  “Jesus Christ!” she heard. It was very loud and made her look up. Aggie was standing at the far end of the table, her hands planted on it in fists. “How could you be so clumsy? You’ve ruined your goddamned dress!”

  Had she never shouted before? Of course, but not like this, not in front of people, and not swearing. June could feel her father standing, moving in behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders, looking over her head at her mother. June stared too.

  Does Aggie think something like that could be forgotten? That was no mere expression of anger. It was rage and fury, and something that looked like hatred. And it wasn’t for a single incident, either. It was for everything. It was not something June interpreted, but something she knew, right into her bones.

  “It’s all right, bunny,” her father was saying quietly, bending over her. His voice was a little shaky, a bit high; he must have seen, too. “Here, I’ll just wipe off th
e worst of it.” He looked up. “Everybody carry on, eat up before your ice cream melts. It’s nothing serious.” He knelt beside her, sponging at her dress, while the others, very quietly now, began to eat again. His kindness undid her. “Come on, bunny, don’t cry, it’s just a dress, it’s not important. It could happen to anybody, it’s all right.”

  It was nice of him to pretend she was crying for the dress.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, quit bawling.” Through tears, Aggie was just a huge, dark, powerful form standing at the far end of the table.

  “Stop it,” he said quietly. To Aggie, not to her. But what exactly was he telling her to stop? Hurting June? Hating them? June thinks now that he meant it absolutely. He wanted her mother to stop being, to vanish.

  Quickly and uncomfortably her friends finished eating and left, sliding as unobtrusively as possible out the door.

  What a mess June was: drenched in chocolate and tears, her party ringlets limp and dangling, even her white stockings wrinkled around her ankles. All that awful brown smeared across her dress. Her mother began to clear the table silently, stacking the dishes, picking crumbs from the floor, her mouth set in that bitter way she had perfected. Her father was saying over and over, helplessly, “It’s all right, don’t cry. It’s all right.”

  “It’s damn well not all right,” Aggie snapped finally. “Take her upstairs and wash her. There’s water in the basin in my room, and a clean cloth. Get that dress off and get her into a nightgown. And throw out the dress, it can’t be cleaned. Jesus.”

  “There’s no need to swear.”

  “Go to blazes.”

  He smiled at June a little shakily, and took her hand. His hand was so dry! Hers was wet. When she thinks of it, it seems his hands were always papery-dry, like an old man’s.

  They were both uneasy in Aggie’s room; it was so clearly hers, more or less forbidden to them both in normal times.

  He’d never undressed June before, and was clumsy and ill at ease about it. The heap of pink taffeta lay spoiled on the floor. “I know it’s early,” he said, “but maybe you should stay up here in your room, and I’ll come and tell you a story.” He told her the one about Goldilocks and the three bears. Had he forgotten she was growing up? Did he think her safer as a baby? Did he like her better as a baby?

  Too old for the story, she heard it in an older way. The danger of what Goldilocks had done struck her: how dangerous it was to be where you didn’t belong, how risky to fall asleep when it would be wise to stay awake. How foolish, taking safety for granted.

  What she could not make out was what she’d done that was so bad. Certainly she’d been clumsy, but that didn’t warrant a look like that. It must have been something from long before a ruined dress. What did her mother blame her for?

  Later, she heard them shouting, which was rare, and she cried again because it was her fault somehow, and downstairs, her father was suffering for some flaw in her that her mother could not bear.

  ELEVEN

  “Oh, for God’s sake, June,” Aggie snaps, “I don’t remember your damned birthday party. Why on earth would I? How can you still be harping about something fifty years ago?”

  “How could you have forgotten?”

  Actually, Aggie does have some recollection of making a taffeta dress, but not the occasion. In the depression, she made almost everything she and June wore, and some of the teacher’s clothes as well. But June expects her to remember something about spilled cake and ice cream? Really, she’s going to be a very silly old woman if she keeps this up; if she doesn’t learn the importance of proper memory.

  “It was the expression on your face.”

  “What?”

  “Hate.” Said flatly. “It looked like hate.”

  “How ridiculous. You mean, as if I hated you?”

  “Me. Everything.”

  “Oh, June, how could you have imagined a thing like that? Of course I didn’t hate you. Haven’t I been trying to tell you how much I wanted you, it wasn’t only your father who did?”

  But did she love June? An obedient child, yes. When they went out together, people said, “She’s so like your husband, isn’t she? And such a good little girl.” Not at all what Aggie had had in mind, not a daughter who resembled him, or one who was good. This quiet obedience merely showed a lack of imagination, as far as Aggie could see.

  “I know what I saw.” June pauses. “If it wasn’t that, what was it?”

  “Honestly, I can’t remember. I simply don’t remember anything about it. But I suppose I might have been angry. I might just have been fed up. I was so fed up, June, you can’t imagine. It was nothing to do with you, though. I’m sure if I was angry, it was him, not you.”

  Part lie, part truth. True that she couldn’t have hated the child. Disapproved of her sometimes, or was disappointed. But not true that it had nothing to do with her. It made everything worse, how much he loved his daughter. She felt her own child had been stolen. And he never once returned to her room after June was born.

  “I think,” she says, daring a great confession, “I might have been angry that you got along so well. Sometimes I didn’t think either of you even noticed I was there, as long as the house was taken care of and your meals were on the table.” She might be drunk, dizzy with admission.

  At least June’s face has softened. At least she looks more curious now than resentful and accusing.

  “But if you liked me, you didn’t show it.”

  “I did, you know. You just don’t remember.”

  Well, she did like the baby: danced with her when she cried, and sang to her and really did make an effort to alter images. It was something like what she had done before she married him: changing the vision to fit reality.

  She, too, told June stories, reading little books to her and talking about the farm, her family. Her stories didn’t seem to grip the child, though, not like his. Perhaps, unlike Aggie’s family, who could be visited, his people were more alluring, being so far away.

  Their voices, their speech, were so similar, his and June’s. When they spoke, the sound went through her head like a drill. It was irritating to have to hold onto June when he was leaving for school and feel her excitement when the time was coming for him to be home. She was like a little animal, sensing his approach.

  Aggie remembers a decade of being married, a muddy-colored recollection involving a sense of trudging. Determined, hard-working days, and a child who was turning out as unexpectedly as her marriage. Their failure, his and Aggie’s, remained inexplicable; how they managed to disintegrate so forcibly and irrevocably, and so swiftly. Maybe it was a fault in her mind then that she couldn’t work it out, or, having worked it out, resolve it. That’s a theory. What she felt was that he was entirely wrong-headed, a disputatious bully, a frantic, feeble dictator who had mistaken her for someone else.

  Looking at him sitting across from her at the supper table, she could think, “Well, to hell with you.” But there he was, not just in the flesh, in his brown suit and white shirt, but a presence in her life, like a headache. Even when she was angry, she was angry with him, so that in a way it was his anger. What would have happened if she’d said, “Listen, sit down, let’s talk about what’s wrong and what we can do to fix it”? That’s the sort of thing Frances would do; Frances, who sometimes lapses unfortunately into the words of silly magazines, advocating “openness” and “honesty”.

  Well, what would have happened? Probably, like the gingham dog and the calico cat, they’d have eaten each other up.

  As it was, they only gnawed at each other’s edges. He left her money for household spending under the sugar bowl on the kitchen table every Friday. She might say, “Well, we can’t eat your position, can we?” Or she could regard his Sunday suit doubtfully as he was going out the door to church and say, “It’s too bad, you know, it’s gotten shiny at the back like that, when you can�
�t afford a new one.”

  They weren’t poor, just had to be careful. But it was a way of digging at something important to him: his ability to make a living, and his status. Not much, after all, compared with the wounds he could inflict: that he did not find her tempting or appealing.

  Either to try to find the key to all this, or to escape, she can’t recall which, she began to read. She does remember thinking that she was damned if he’d have any advantage, including whatever he knew from those little packages of information on the front-room shelves. And that sometimes it was nice to hide in other lives. But damned if she could tell, wading through his books, just where he thought his advantage lay. These were for children, small moral tales. They were not power, and certainly not wisdom. They did help her learn words and gain confidence. She found it increasingly easy to hear words flowing into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into stories. It was like doing exercises, building strength. But to what point? To learn that it was bad to lie and steal, and manly to be brave? These were things you could learn by listening to sermons.

  “Have you been dusting my books?” he asked irritably. “Some of them are out of order. I wish you’d put them back where you found them when you’re cleaning.”

  It occurred to her that she did not see him reading, except when he was preparing lessons. She’d had an impression of a learned man, but he seemed to have stopped at some point. What kind of teacher must he have been? Likely the sort of husband he was. Except that she thought he was a little afraid of her, whereas naturally he would not be afraid of his pupils. Perhaps he was also afraid of that glimpse of himself in the blow he had struck once, the marks of his fingers on her cheek. He probably hadn’t known he could do a thing like that.

  The blow she struck, answering him, was instant and instinctive, not a defence but a response. If he were ashamed of his moment of weakness, she was proud that, without thinking, she’d taken care of herself. That did not seem to her to be violence; more an assertion, a proper positioning of the two of them. A wordless setting out of the rules: do that and this will immediately occur.