Now she is bent over a low table, serving up the cake.
“Oh, Mom,” says Jade, mildly reproachful, teasing, “you’re going to let Dad have a piece of cake, aren’t you?” A lifetime up here in the country, beside the river, has turned her into a bronzed, athletic girl, with a healthy glow. Her crimped, strawberry-blonde hair measures to her elbow, and she has a fine, long nose and white, white teeth. Eric has told Anne that every time he sees Jade, he’s shocked by her beauty.
“She hasn’t made any mistakes with her life yet,” Anne said. “That’s why she’s still beautiful.”
Desiré and Cassandra, who have been swimming with Lance, come out of the river to get a piece of cake. They are fourteen and twelve, both of them with dark curls. Eric, now that he’s not living with them any more, now that, as he says, he misses them like crazy, seems to be able to remember their names.
Jade, sitting on one of the patio chairs, is opening Eric’s gift. He’s bought her a compact disc player.
“How much did that cost?” asks Anne, who has been paying matrimonial support to Eric ever since they separated.
“It was on sale,” says Eric evasively.
“Aw, Dad, don’t tell me that,” says Jade. “It spoils it.”
“You’re spoiled,” says Eric, pleased with himself, as though he can take sole credit for it.
“It seems to me,” says Anne to Eric, “you could be less frivolous with my money.”
“These days, in a divorce,” says Mrs. King regretfully from a chair in a corner of the patio, “women have all the power.” Mrs. King suffered a mild stroke soon after Eric’s suicide attempt. Although it didn’t impair her speech or mobility, she has a blanched look now, as though she has seen her own ghost. She’s not exactly fragile yet, but she seems to have lost physical mass, and moves carefully these days, gripping doorknobs and the arms of chairs whenever she can, as though her bones have become hollow and weightless and she fears she might float weightlessly up into the sky if she doesn’t hold herself down.
Lance, water streaming from his swimsuit onto the patio, eats a piece of cake right out of his hand. He hasn’t gotten thinner with time. His stomach is like a great, white balloon in danger of bursting. He is always boasting that he hasn’t seen his toes in years. “Hey, you guys,” he reproaches Eric and Anne gently, grinning, icing on his face, “I thought this was supposed to be a party.”
“Yeah, Mom,” says Jade, scowling at Anne.
Eric’s attention is caught by a movement up on the hill. “Well, lookee who’s here,” he says without pleasure. They turn to see Reed round the corner of the house. For the past few years he’s been working in the oil fields, at isolated camps in northern Alberta. The money is good in that business and his only complaint is that there are no women to be had. He comes back home once or twice a year, but, as far as they know, keeps pretty much to himself. Now he lopes down the hill toward them, long-legged, loose-jointed, wearing black skin-hugging jeans, a black shirt, cowboy boots and a Stetson.
“Looks like Palladin,” says Lance.
“What’s he doing here?” asks Eric, narrowing his eyes at Anne. “Who invited him?”
“If the rest of you can come up here and park yourselves, why shouldn’t he?” says Anne with a shrug.
“Who’s Palladin?” asks Cassandra.
* * *
At five o’clock, Anne still hasn’t been able to get rid of Eric and Mrs. King. Jade, dressed to go out, comes into the kitchen, where Anne is wiping the counter.
“Why don’t you let Daddy stay for supper?” she asks. “He came all this way. The least you could do is feed him. All you’ve given him since he got here is one little piece of cake. He’s been really sweet today, don’t you think?”
Jade and Anne do not see eye to eye on Eric. “I can’t believe,” says Anne, “that you can be so easily sucked in by him. Don’t you remember how he used to talk to you? He used to treat you like shit.”
“Well,” says Jade smugly, “I know how to forgive.”
“You can afford to forgive. You’ve got the rest of your life ahead of you. But be careful. People don’t change. They pretend to change, but in the long run they don’t. They just stay their same old rotten selves.”
Jade looks at her pityingly. “You’re getting really cynical, you know that?” she says unhappily. “In fact, you’ve gotten to be a real bitch.”
“Have I?” says Anne lightly, with a cold smile. “Well, this bitch is clothing and feeding you.”
Jade picks up her purse angrily and strides out the front door.
“Happy birthday!” Anne calls after her, her voice full of irony.
A few minutes later, Eric comes in, wearing his bathing suit and drying the back of his neck with a towel. “Nice to get in the river after so long,” he says, but Anne ignores the remark. She has become adept at stepping around Eric’s hints that he’d like to move back in with her. Mrs. King comes into the kitchen, too, and stands by the door. Ever since Anne’s remark at the hospital, there has been a stone wall between them. Eric pulls a shirt on over his head. “Where’d Jade go? I saw somebody come and pick her up in a car.”
“She’s gone out with her friends to celebrate.”
“Where to?”
“She never tells me,” says Anne. “They’ll probably end up at the club later on.”
“That’s no place for her,” says Eric.
“I’ve talked to her about birth control.”
“Birth control!” says Eric. “Christ! She’s only sixteen!”
Anne smiles at him sweetly. “The shoe’s on the other foot now, and it pinches, is that it?”
Eric suggests that he take Cassandra and Desiré out for a ride in the sailboat, but Anne tells him they’ve walked into the nearby town with Lance to see an early movie. Lance will stay overnight and catch a ride home into the city with Reed.
“Reed?” says Eric.
“Yes,” says Anne. “He’s offered to stay over to work on those shed repairs you mentioned.”
Eric snorts, incredulous. “That’s a good joke,” he says sarcastically. “He doesn’t know the right end of a hammer.”
“I’m sure he’ll manage,” says Anne. “I think it’s time you left, Eric. You wouldn’t want to overstay your welcome, would you?” she adds with sweet sarcasm.
In the bathroom, Eric changes from his bathing suit to his slacks and comes out to the kitchen again, his rolled-up towel under his arm. Passing Anne, who is picking over some fruit in a big wooden bowl, he says, “Your hospitality has been overwhelming,” and goes out the sliding-glass door.
Mrs. King picks up her purse. Anne notices how stooped she’s become and how her dark lipstick bleeds like paint into the puckers around her mouth. Before turning to go out, Mrs. King looks at Anne sternly. “You can get the law to restrict Eric from coming here,” she said, “but you can’t keep his heart away from this place.”
Anne stands there pressing the navel of a cantaloup experimentally with her thumbnail. She raises her eyebrows and says pleasantly, “That’s odd. When he lived here with me, his heart always seemed to be somewhere else. All he wanted to do was get out. Why would that be? Maybe it was the recollection of you with a two-by-four in your hand.”
Mrs. King ignores the remark, as though the stroke damaged her hearing. “This house will always belong to the Kings, no matter who holds the mortgage,” she says. “It’s ours and so is the river.”
Just then they hear shouting from outside. Anne drops the cantaloup on the counter and rushes out the door. Mrs. King follows slowly. Up on the hill behind the house, under the inky pines, Reed is sprawled backward across the hood of his car. Eric is standing back with a look of satisfaction, watching Reed cautiously and rubbing his knuckles.
Anne looks at them, her hands on her hips. “What the hell’s going on?” she demands. “Who started it this time? I suppose it was you, Eric.” Eric does not look at her, but shoves his hands in his pockets. Reed is nursing a
cut in a corner of his mouth.
“I must have been out of my mind to let you come up here,” says Anne to Eric. “It wasn’t for me. It was for you and the girls, and this is the thanks I get for putting up with you all day. You can’t get along with anybody, can you, even your own brother? You’ll never grow up.”
“I saw Reed putting one of my best wrenches in the trunk of his car,” Eric says angrily. “He’s got no business taking that.”
Reed stands up and presses the back of his hand to his mouth.
“Those tools are only half yours,” Anne reminds Eric, “and you’ve got no use for them in an apartment anyway. Now, I want you to clear out of here, or I’ll call the cops.”
Eric stands there for a moment, clenching his fists, evidently considering his options. At last he says, “Okay, fine. I’ll go peacefully. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be back.”
“Oh, you scare me to death,” says Anne, mocking him.
“Come on, Mom,” says Eric bitterly, getting behind the wheel.
Mrs. King moves slowly to the car and opens her door. She climbs in awkwardly as though she’s forgotten what a car is, her legs stiff, her feet clumsy in her thick-heeled shoes, both hands braced on the door frame, her square purse banging against her hip. The car drives off up the hill to the highway, spitting gravel out from under its tires.
Anne leads Reed into the kitchen, where she examines his split mouth.
“Your husband is an asshole,” Reed tells her, wincing as she applies ice to his mouth.
“Well, in three weeks he won’t be my husband any more, but he’ll still be your brother,” says Anne, and Reed snorts with bitter amusement.
“Why’d you take the wrench?” she asks.
“I got something I can use it on. D’you mind?”
“No,” she says quickly.
“I didn’t think you would,” he says with a knowing smirk. He takes her hand away from his face, seizes her by the wrist and pulls her roughly toward him. He bends to kiss her and she is lifted back to the summer of the white ship. Now she feels Reed’s strong fingers pulling the tails of her blouse out of her shorts, his rough oilman’s hands riding up her stomach, pushing back her bra. He kneads her breasts rhythmically, with bruising strength, watching her face. She winces, aroused but torn. Soon they will lie down together, Reed will slide into her, greedy, fugitive, brutal, drive himself deep within her, stirring up old wounds, old desires. Anne wants him. She wants him, and yet. And yet, some part of her is saddened, humiliated by her need to be entered, replenished, completed by this blood brother of her ex-husband, this second son of a woman she hates. For doesn’t this make her, when all is said and done, no better than they? All these years when she thought she was so much above Eric’s family, so separate from their violence, their disloyal ways, she is still turning to them for sustenance, for approbation.
“Tell you what,” Reed says. “Why don’t you go and fix yourself up while I smoke a joint? Jesus, I’ve been waiting for a high all afternoon.”
Anne goes into the bathroom to freshen up, then crosses the hall to her bedroom, where she pulls out a drawer, looking for something enticing to wear. She pauses for a moment, stepping to the window to look out. It is nearly eight o’clock and dusk is falling, the grey light flattening the shapes of everything. The river has turned silver in the soft night. Anne watches its steady, drugged current, feels herself pulled down by it. For a moment, she sees herself—a young, rebellious woman many years ago—standing on the shore of the river, flinging her wallet, identification and all, out across the gleaming surface. What I really wanted to do that day, she now realizes, was to throw myself into the river, to free myself of Eric and his family forever, to sink gently beneath the watery surface, sending out a delicate pattern of ripples.
The smell of Reed’s joint drifts down the hall to her.
I must go and tell Reed I want him to leave, thinks Anne. But she does not move. She stands at the window biting her nails. I must go and tell him that.
THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
TARA SAID, “That Irmgard!”
“That Irmgard!” she said one Saturday afternoon at the kitchen table where she was doing her homework.
Franklin was opposite her, sorting his hockey cards.
“That Irmgard! I just love her!” Tara was in the co-op program at school where they go out half-days into the community and work in some job situation to get an idea of different walks of life. Harlan had got her a placement at his school, with the kindergarten teacher.
I said, “Irmgard, Irmgard.” I was washing up the lunch dishes. “When will we stop hearing about Irmgard?”
Tara said, “Irmgard’s wonderful. Isn’t she, Dad?”
Harlan, reading nearby on the family-room sofa, looked up. “She’s a very fine teacher,” he said neutrally.
“She knows every one of those kindergarten children inside out,” Tara told us. “She listens. She understands. She loves them like a mother. She sees their faults and yet she doesn’t criticize. She brings out their strengths instead. They adore her.”
I said, “You’ve turned her into a saint because of her wooden leg. Would you canonize me if I had one?” I heard Harlan sigh from the couch.
“Irmgard is strong and deep and good,” Tara said, her voice quivering with admiration.
I said, “And, of course, I’m not.”
“Why are you so insecure? Why do you take everything personally?” Tara asked bitterly, her eyes blazing at me. The hatred of teenagers is so pure. Pure as the wind. It takes your breath away. Sometimes Tara looked at me with such loathing that I had to wonder who it was she was seeing.
“Did you hear what she said, Harlan?” I demanded, looking to him for support, always a mistake.
“You do seem to be threatened by other people’s strengths,” he said with gentle honesty.
“Do you think that, Franklin?” I asked, looking at our son, who gave a little, torn smile. He was an expert at skating around conflict.
“I don’t suppose we could go down to the store and buy me some more hockey cards?” he said, his voice like a sparrow’s song. He was at that golden age of childhood, which seems to fall between the ages of ten and twelve. Children at that age are blessed in a way that they never will be again in their lives. They are full of optimism and naivety and such deep trust in life that it breaks your heart in a way. He played goalie on a bantam team. It was enough to make him happy. Life could be that simple.
Tara said, “I want to model myself after Irmgard. I’ve decided I’m going to be a teacher.”
I said, “A teacher! You’re going to throw yourself away on a pack of brats like your father did?”
“What do you think I should be?” asked Tara. “A waitress?”—which of course was a dig at me. Then for an instant she looked so like my mother. It was not just the thick black hair falling against the fine bones of her face, but something more—in her expression I saw my mother the blind missionary, the willing victim, the fortress, the wise, profound and unshakable woman I could never reach or understand—and I felt that already Tara had passed me in life somehow.
Of course, then, Tara decided to pack up her books and march off in a huff to work in her room. Franklin slid away from the table too. He had an instinct for seeking out places of calm, like a river flowing gently to the sea.
After they were gone, Harlan sighed that weary little sigh he’d perfected and looked at me tragically, a thick text balanced on his knee. He always had his nose in some book, being what they call cerebral. When I met him I was working down on Elgin Street in a diner and he used to come across from the old stone teachers’ college after classes and sit in one of the window booths in the sun, reading some tome and drinking coffee or enjoying a student’s supper of minestrone soup. Beyond the window, the world slid past, unnoticed by him. His long flowing hair and full blond beard lent him a biblical look.
“Here comes the prophet Abraham,” I’d say to the girls when we saw h
im come in, and though I joked, I sensed the strength in him. Sitting there in the sun, he seemed to be the source of the light, its power spread out from him miraculously, and along with it a serenity that must have come from the great weight of knowledge he’d amassed in his young head, leaving him at peace, grounded, like a ship at anchor. This aura flowing out from him filled me with irrational hope. One day I went over and handed him an extra paper serviette.
I said, “You have let soup fall in your beard.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking the serviette and dabbing at his beard. “I am often absent-minded.” He looked up at me, searching my face carefully. “Would you like to go to a movie on your day off?” he asked, though it was obvious he’d never seen me before, notwithstanding that I’d been carrying his coffee to him for months, taking special care not to slop it over the rim and sometimes sliding a digestive cookie onto the saucer too. He’d never noticed I hadn’t charged him for the cookies, and for all I knew he didn’t even remember eating them. His face told me he was fond of people, even of strangers. His expression was warm and spontaneous and so ready to let me in that for just an instant I feared for him. “You are very observant,” he said, and he told me he thought I’d be good for him, I’d keep him connected to “real life.”
Soon, Harlan was saying he’d never met a girl like me before. He said he loved my skewed sense of humour and my rebelliousness and my strength and he loved my family, because of course I’d taken him home by this time. He said he especially loved my brother Art and I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Then Harlan came out with all this psychological bunk about Art being a free spirit and an original personality and misunderstood by society and blah-blah-blah, and I told him, “Harlan, you’ve got a lot to learn.”
When we got married, Harlan taught grade one and for a long time I looked up to him and felt proud and amazed to be his wife. After a while, though, I kept expecting him to grow up and get tired of playing with Plasticine and wooden blocks, but he said there was a lot more to his job than that. He got a reputation all over the school board as a progressive teacher, an advocate of what they now call child-centred learning. He moved the desks out of his classroom and put a sofa and an Indian rug in their place to make the children think that learning was not a task but a natural and easy part of life. He got rid of tests and marks and report cards. He was all in favour of self-esteem and emotional growth. Once there was a big article on him in the paper that I cut out and thought about having framed. People began to say to him: Why don’t you move on? Why don’t you go for principal? Why don’t you develop curricula, spread your message from the top down? But he said no, he liked it at the grass roots, he didn’t want to lose touch with “The Children.” I told him, “You could make more money in administration, you could be somebody,” but he just gave me that pitying smile I was becoming accustomed to. I told him he wasn’t a real man—because you don’t see grown men, do you, teaching little kids, it’s unnatural?
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