Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  The trolley car passed by the Ashburn house and Sara noted a flagpole on the front lawn, a Union Jack snapping in the stiff breeze, and couldn’t recall it having been there. You dumb bunny, she thought. Fool. How ridiculous to think she would ring the doorbell and be invited in. Likely Emily Ashburn had forgotten she’d ever worked there.

  She rode to the end of the line and returned downtown, stepping off where she’d boarded, into the roar and impatience of traffic. The day had warmed considerably, and as she went to the Metropolitan store, where she hoped to purchase running shoes, people were streaming from shops and offices without their winter attire. She entered the flow of pedestrians, her shopping bags setting her apart from the clerks, the stenographers, the business people. Light wavered in puddles beyond the curb, and when a vehicle approached, the people around her swerved to the inside of the sidewalk, called out to the driver and ruefully laughed at nearly being soaked.

  Sara felt their exuberance at being freed from the bulkiness of winter, and gave in to it. She unbuttoned her coat and enjoyed the wash of warm air against her throat; the papery crackle of the bags afforded her a sense of accomplishment. She’d already purchased underwear for the girls, tea towels, the prescribed connect-the-dots and colouring books; a corselet, as several stays on the one she wore had worked through the cloth and poked when she moved suddenly; a jackknife for Sonny Boy.

  She found herself among several women at an intersection, waiting for the traffic light to change. They were on their coffee break, likely, going to a luncheonette, a diner or perhaps the cafeteria at Eaton’s. Young women whose hair was teased into stiff twists and smooth domes, their ears covered with pearly-looking plastic earrings fanning halfway across their cheeks. She’d seen similar earrings in the Met and thought of Alvina. But she couldn’t imagine her wearing them. And so she’d purchased an angora collar instead, hoping it would soften her daughter’s perpetually sallow complexion. Where, oh where had that come from? Certainly not from her.

  She had bought a bottle of Evening in Paris, and a jar of Pond’s vanishing cream. Given how quickly the jar emptied, the cream seemingly did vanish. She suspected Emilie applied it to her warts, but of course the girl denied doing so. She bought a flannel shirt for Oliver, whose spring bouts of bronchitis were becoming a worry; and several cards of fishing spoons. Manny and Simon had taken the fishing rods and reels outside to practise casting and had snagged the telephone wires. Oliver had had to cut the line in order to free the rods. If you boys want to go fishing so badly, why didn’t you just say so? Oliver had promised he would take them soon. He didn’t recognize his sons’ antics for what they were, a reminder of the promises he’d made in the heat of generosity, just as the holes in the backyard shed windows were a reminder that he had promised to take them target shooting with their air guns.

  Days might pass during which Oliver only vaguely noticed he had children. He was sometimes so far gone into his thoughts that he didn’t hear their questions, or their quarrelling for attention. He afforded them vague answers, a shrug, a turning away, and Sara fumed over the luxury a man had to be able to shut things out. And then suddenly he arrived at the meal table one evening fully present and engaged, eager to visit. He blew smoke rings for them to slip their fingers through, was tickled by their antics, hauled them onto his lap to inspect their school notebooks.

  The traffic light changed and the women around Sara moved forward, only to come to an abrupt stop in front of a store. Sara caught up to them and saw the display that had captured their rapt attention: three spring brides in a show window. The gowned mannequins were framed by a trellis intertwined with artificial apple blossoms and cotton batting fluffed against the window glass to resemble clouds. The gowns gleamed with a whiteness of organdy, satin and tulle, adorned with lace and beads.

  Alvina and Ida pestered her to know what she’d worn on her wedding day. She replied, A green dress. Your aunt made it. It was winter and Annie thought green would be nice. But she knew that they wished for a description of a gown such as the store mannequins were wearing. A fingertip veil held in place by a tiara of mother-of-pearl sequins. The bridal trains were arranged in a half-circle on the floor around their feet, and sprinkled with confetti, champagne glasses tipped onto their sides as though just emptied in a toast.

  Oh, my. How nice. How very, very nice, she thought, hearing her own sarcasm through the silent awe of the young women around her. They lingered a moment longer and then broke away all at once from the bridal spectacle, resuming their quest for coffee, she assumed, while she remained, absorbed and shaking. Here comes the bride, all flushed with pride. Or embarrassment at being the centre of attention. Yes. Go ahead and enjoy it, missy. Because it’s not going to last very long. The extravagant show put on at weddings these days made her furious, because it made her want to weep.

  She’d spent the night of her real wedding, her second wedding, waiting for Oliver to return. Hours passed and the supply of wood he’d left for her ran out, the fire dwindled and dampness began to engulf the room. She ventured outside to replenish the wood and stood for a moment hugging herself against the frigid air, searching for the sight of him. Across the street, a blob of darkness hovered above the ditch. She called out, but the shape neither came closer nor retreated.

  Throughout the previous months she’d nestled into Oliver’s sticky embrace in his room under the stairs, and had come to know their mingling yeasty odour. Tonight she hadn’t recognized the arrangement of his features, their severity, when he told her she’d better get used to him being a working man. She was rattled by the sudden retraction of goodwill.

  She chewed at the skin of her knuckles, rather than give in to a desire to weep. Water only meant more water. A gushing tap was hard to staunch. She felt Alvina move inside her, a heel sliding down, grazing the wall of her womb. Peter, Peter, went into the water. When he came out, he let out a poop. The Low German ditty came to her, the sound of her mother’s singing chant, her laughter, as she dipped a baby into its bath. She returned to the house and dressed, pulled on a pair of Oliver’s pants over her nightgown.

  I’m going to see a man about a dog. The old gentlemen want a game of cards after closing. A late customer held me up. I was jawing, is all, Oliver would say in the coming years. Chewing the fat, listening while a fella took a load off. A man’s got to be sociable; especially once Oliver’s second source of income, the after-hours and Sunday trade in liquor, became necessary to provide for the growing number of Vandals.

  When he didn’t return at the expected time she would put on his curling sweater, a tar-stained parka, a rain slicker, and go out into the dark as she had done the first time he’d left her. Later it was jealousy that drove her out in search of him, but that first night it was fear of being alone. The night of her real wedding, fear heated her pulse and drove her into the unknown.

  Within a few swift years she was no longer alone, but surrounded by small bodies with beating wild hearts and muscles twitching in sleep, her children continuing in dreams the journeys they had begun the moment they emerged from her body. Straining to be off and away from her, no matter how tightly she swaddled them.

  Her belly muscles jiggled after a recent birth of a child as, stomach unbound, she went out into the night in search of Oliver. Vowing that this time she would venture far enough to determine if a window at the hotel blazed with light as the card players went about their game in an upstairs room. Or whether, as she suspected, the hotel was shut down and Oliver had gone walking to see that woman.

  When she was lying in after a birth, he deemed it necessary to stay at the hotel to make way for Annie, who came to cook and tend the children, houseclean with a fury and sew new curtains. Annie layered the kitchen floor with coats of paste wax, glossing it to a hard shine that hurt the eyes. At the end of a day, she gathered the children about the dining-room table and taught them a German prayer, a song; required that they read aloud from a German reader she had brought with her. She put the gi
rls to work learning simple daisy-chain stitches of embroidery to render the store-bought tea towels in a kitchen drawer respectable, while Oliver stood in the doorway looking on. Having arrived silently and unnoticed, and leaving the same way. Sara worried that Oliver used these periods of freedom to see Alice whenever he liked.

  In the nights Sara had never been able to get as far as the hotel. But if she had, and had then discovered the squat, demoralized building in darkness, she would not have been able to find the narrow trail that went along the highway and down through bush to the ferry. Or crossed the frozen river to determine whether or not Oliver was with the woman. If she had, she might have come upon him as he was returning, bringing with him a shopping bag filled with shoes, which he would claim Alice had sent to the hotel earlier in the day.

  The darkened houses, the sound of the wind in the trees, a dog barking, quickly diminished Sara’s determination to uncover the truth, and her angry words settled to the bottom of her stomach. Inevitably she returned home to a house of sleeping children, or to discover that a light had been turned on in her absence. Alvina’s round face peering out from a window. Alvina, drowned in sleep like all the others before Sara left the house, often awakened as the door closed behind her mother. Knowing, somehow, that Sara was gone.

  Sara stared at her reflection in the bridal-store window, a woman approaching forty years, her coat hanging open, her suit creased across the front—a beast of burden laden with shopping bags, and she still had to buy four pairs of running shoes before the late afternoon bus departed for Union Plains. She had given birth to ten children in less than twenty years. But if she fixed her eyes a certain way, she could imagine a beautiful and youthful woman whose features were soft and unbound from the determination to make something of those children. Especially the boys.

  She had just rearranged her features when she became aware of a woman in the store hovering behind the display of brides. There was no mistaking the distinct pixie-like features, the small brilliant eyes accentuated by mahogany curls across her forehead and hugging her ears. Sara’s scalp tightened. Alice Bouchard. She immediately thought, my feet. She was wearing Alice’s shoes. Then she looked down, flooded with relief that she had kept her rain boots on over the shoes. The sidewalks were gritty underfoot, and so she’d decided against stowing the overshoes in a locker.

  She felt anger rising, words she’d never used coming unbidden. You whore. Bitch, thief of my husband’s mind. Oliver’s bouts of preoccupation were likely brought about by an anticipated visit with this woman. Of course. Why hadn’t she realized this before? He went to see Alice to be immersed in the language of their time, their history, the people they had in common. Immersed in each other’s bodies, for all she knew. She’d once smelled an odour on Oliver when he’d returned late during the night, a spicy scent that she didn’t recognize.

  His shaving soap, Old Spice, he said. She’d bought it for him as a Christmas gift from the kids. He’d shaved at the hotel before coming home so he wouldn’t need to do it the following day. That way he might get at things around the house sooner. Tar the roof of the back porch. Putty the windows. Sara wanted to send Alvina to his closet under the stairs to scratch the bar of shaving soap, bring its scent home under her fingernails so Sara might know for certain. Yes? No. No, yes. Yes, yes! Oh God, the see-sawing of dread, of peace; of an enfolding tenderness in her gut when she thought, I’m wrong.

  Alice turned away from the window. Moments later, the shop door opened and she stepped out into the street carrying several packages. She was not wearing overshoes, but rather red pumps with needle-nosed toes, a beige suit, its Joan Crawford shoulder padding squaring her frame and making her waist look even tinier than it was. Her perfectly drawn features and ivory complexion brought to mind a porcelain doll. She went over to a new two-tone Buick parked beside the curb, and was about to open the trunk when she became aware of Sara and turned, her small brilliant eyes sweeping across Sara’s body, a slight mocking smile forming. Then she put the packages inside, closed the lid and went on down the sidewalk.

  Sara was almost certain as she watched that figure mincing off down the street, a shoulder bag bumping against her hip, shorn head held high. The defiant click of her stiletto heels against the sidewalk seemed to tell Sara that Oliver had been there. He’d put his sex into that woman’s narrow body and then had come home and done the same to her.

  Only she wasn’t sure. And if she had been, what could she have done?

  I wanted to hit her, Sara told Coral at the bus depot later. Smack that look right off her face, she said, without confessing what she had done. She raised her voice in order to be heard above the sound of water running in one of the cubicles, a toilet tank leaking and constantly refilling. A moment passed.

  That’s reasonable, honey. The Almighty, he sure do understand anger.

  Oliver says they’re friends from way back. Maybe they are just friends, Sara said, with more hope than conviction. Do you love me? she asked him, and always he said, I married you, didn’t I? Would I still be here if I didn’t? He refused to say the word.

  Honey, where’s your brains? Men and women can’t be just friends, Coral said. It’s a law of nature.

  Yes, Sara thought with a sinking feeling, that sounds like the truth.

  The washroom held an antiseptic odour from a recent mopping of the floor, and its hexagonal tiles were still wet and shining. The shopping bags took up the entire area of Sara’s cubicle; a third bag had been added, bulky with the running shoes she’d come across in a bin at the mail-order as she went up and down the aisles, her heart burning, trying not to imagine Oliver and Alice joined together. Thinking, the whore got what she deserves.

  But it’s wrong, she said now, her voice too loud and echoing. He’s married, he’s a family man. Disloyal, dishonest, dissolute, lying son of a bitch.

  Yah, Coral agreed. That’s men. They can’t help themselves. A stiff prick’s got no conscience. The Almighty understands your anger, wanting to hit that woman. But that doesn’t make it right.

  I beg your pardon? Sara asked. She undid the clasp of a rainboot and kicked it off. Then stuck her foot under the cubicle into the next one. Do you see these shoes? She gives them to me as a way to keep her hooks into Oliver.

  If you think that, then why do you wear them? Coral asked.

  Because, she said. Because I like the way my feet look, she thought. Her feet had stopped growing too soon in life, and she had been forced to wear children’s shoes throughout her adult years, until Oliver brought home the first bag of Alice’s footwear. She felt finished then, her tiny foot admired and complemented rather than being a peculiarity; which was what she had been, a peculiarity, until she’d left the old country. A person who’d been spared death, while her family had not. Was it wrong to want to look like everyone else?

  She was angry again. Angry that Coral would dismiss her with a platitude—God sure does understand, but that doesn’t make it right. Huh! I have every right.

  The graffiti she had come to expect on the walls of the cubicle, the crude but direct expression of desires, the declarations and curses, had been recently painted over. But there were two new angry-looking slashes in the fresh paint. Sara understood the intensity of an emotion that would press that hard with a sharp object.

  With her shopping bags set about her feet on the street, to obscure her activity from passersby, she had tried to puncture a tire on Alice’s car; but the jackknife she’d bought for Sonny was too blunt for her anger, or else she lacked the strength as she jabbed and twisted at rubber that proved to be impenetrable. She became aware that she was being watched, glanced over her shoulder and saw a teenaged boy leaning against a light standard, looking on with bemused interest.

  You need help? he asked. And when she didn’t answer, he came over and dropped to his haunches beside her. He was about the age of Sonny Boy, she guessed, his face freckled, with short brushlike eyelashes that flickered when he saw the jackknife in her hand. You n
eed more than a peashooter, he said. He brought his hand forward and a blade flashed from his fist. His arm jerked and there was a sound of spurting air that quickly became a quiet, steady hiss. He went round the car to the street side and she heard a similar sound. His face appeared above the car, a nonchalant query accompanied by a smile. Do you want me to finish the job? he asked.

  No, that’s enough, she said. She fumbled with her purse, thinking she would give him a dollar, but he was gone, drifting off down a narrow alley between the shop and another store. The first tire had gone flat and the car sagged to one side. A bus approached in the street, sending a wash of water over the sidewalk and the side of Alice’s car as it passed by. Its brakes sang as it glided to a stop beyond the intersection, and several people waiting for it surged forward while others disembarked.

  Quickly she gathered up her bags and walked away, resisted the urge to go faster than necessary. Good, good, good. I’ve done it, she thought, and felt a momentary jab of triumph. Done what? What had she done? she wondered. The heels of her plastic overshoes felt spongy against the sidewalk, and gave her a buoyancy that she did not feel.

  THIRTEEN

  Alvina contemplating

  LVINA CAME OUT onto the fire escape at school, chilled and gulping for air, hugging herself against a shiver she’d gained from the closed-down classroom. The images in the magazine of the human pick-up sticks, the corpses in their striped pajamas, followed her outside. A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness. She recalled the poem and instructed herself to appreciate the weather, the sun like a warm hand against her brow. Rah, rah, rah. At this very moment its rays were manufacturing vitamins on her skin and preventing pimples vulgarious. A meadowlark piped from a fence post in Zinn’s field, a bouncy flute song that failed to raise her spirits. She heard a question in the bird’s trill, Where the hell are you?