by Mary Razzell
I didn’t stay on deck but went below and stayed there until we were well out in the Gap.
22
NELS WAS MARRIED in late July. My mother sent me the newspaper clipping. He married Emma Hoffman, of all people—she of the red hair who works in the telephone office.
“She’s years older than Nels,” wrote my mother. “I can’t imagine what he sees in her. Some people say she’s in the family way.”
How do I feel? I hurt—a sharp, physical pain just under my ribs. All this time, in the back of my mind, I must have held out some hope that Nels and I would be together again.
Working at the Jolly Jumbo helps the hurt, and so do the people I work with, especially Don. He makes arrangements to have the same days off. We rent bikes and explore Stanley Park, play pitch-and-putt, go to see Doris Day movies, and sit on benches and watch Kitsilano Showboat.
It is hard to save money, though. Each payday I try to put fifteen dollars in the bank, but more often than not it is only ten. Now at the end of August I have saved only seventy-two dollars, and the tuition fee at nursing school is one hundred and ten dollars. Besides that, students are expected to buy their own books, shoes and stockings, and uniforms. I’m not going to be able to make the September class. I’ll have to apply for the January one instead. My marks have come from Victoria in the mail, first classes in everything.
I thought of asking my father for the balance of the tuition fee. He probably would give it to me. But I feel now that I’ll never be able to ask him for anything again, although I’m not quite sure why.
I have phoned him once since that time. The clerk at the Campbell River Hotel said he wasn’t in. I left a message— “Everything fine. Sheila.”—and have tried to put the whole episode out of my mind. It works most of the time if I keep myself busy. And my father doesn’t write or phone me, and I am just as happy he doesn’t.
Labour Day is our last very busy time at the drive-in. Then I have three days coming to me, and I’ve decided to go home to visit my mother and brothers. I’ve written every week. If I’m one day late, my mother phones me from Mr. Percy’s store, wondering if I’m all right.
* * *
Mr. Percy has put awnings above the store windows and painted the porch. He has a little more white in his eyebrows, a little rounder paunch under his belt. But his eyes are as bright and astonished looking as ever.
“Well, Sheila,” he kept saying every two minutes as we walked up the wharf together the morning I went home. Then he told me all about the happenings in the village. You’d think I’d been away forever.
We stood there in the September sun, and a smell of ripening apples came from the orchard on the other side of the store. Most of its trees are too old to produce anything more than small, hard fruit, but there is one Snow apple tree off by itself that has somehow managed to thrive. Its apples are large, juicy, sweet—much like a McIntosh but larger—and with fine red lines running through a snow-white flesh. I could see the tree from where I stood.
“Are the Snow apples ripe yet?” I asked Mr. Percy.
“Almost. It’s funny, Sheila. I’ve never seen another Snow apple tree on this whole peninsula. Come to think of it, I’ve never run across it anywhere before. And you’ve never seen such a crop as it has this year! Can’t understand it. Doesn’t get any more sun or rain than the other trees.”
On my way home I walked through the orchard. Mr. Percy was right about the heavy crop of fruit on the Snow apple tree.
The apples weren’t quite ripe. I bit into one. In another couple of weeks they would be sweeter still.
I cut back along the beach. The summer cottages looked forlorn, all closed up for the season. The diving float had been towed away, and I saw it riding behind Shelter Island, where it had been tied up for the winter.
When I got to the bridge between Helga’s place and ours, I hung over the rail to watch the migrating salmon crowd up the creek. Some of the fish looked soft already, even though they had not come that far from the salt water.
I was afraid to go home. Would my mother be able to tell by looking at me what had happened since I last saw her? Or was it possible that she could understand? If what my father said was true, that they hadn’t married...
Pep came bounding up the trail to meet me, racing round and round in circles and barking until my mother came out the back door to see what was the matter. She shaded her eyes against the sun.
“Is that you, Sheila?” She made it sound as if I’d been away for a year and never sent a word home. It was hard not to cry. I bent down to scratch Pep behind the ears.
Straightening up, I said, “Just home for a few days, Mom. Saved up my time off.”
Nothing had changed, it seemed. The door was left open to catch the thin yellow September sunlight, and it lit the varnished plywood walls, showing clearly the swirls in the wood. There was a bowl of tawny chrysanthemums on the kitchen table. Their sharp dry aroma was like smoke. A golden bantam hen stood on the doorsill and put her head on one side, watching us with yellow eyes.
My mother was in the middle of canning pears. I took up a paring knife to help her, and we worked together, the smooth peelings falling from our knives like butter.
“What about nursing school, Sheila?” she asked. “Have you got your application in?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I won’t be able to get in until January’s class. I haven’t been able to save enough money. I thought I could but...”
“How much money do you need?”
I explained.
“That’s not much,” she said. “Maybe something will turn up.”
As I sat across the kitchen table from my mother, peeling pears, their smell in the air between us, I became aware that there was an aloneness now dividing my mother and me.
I no longer believe what she told me about life, about being a woman. I see now that much of her thinking is colored by her upbringing and by her frustrations and disappointments with my father. And that because she thinks I am like him, she tried to get back at him through me.
But I am neither one of them—not my mother, not my father.
The boys came in from school. I could hardly believe that Tom had grown so tall in just two months. His voice had deepened, and he had an Adam’s apple I’d never noticed before.
“You must have grown six inches!” I told him. “What was it? The hard work in the mines at Trail?”
He told me about school.
“I’ve decided to go on to university. I’d like to go into engineering. Working at Trail this summer convinced me of that. And I made fantastic money there!” His voice was steady. It no longer broke unexpectedly at the end of a sentence.
“You all set to go into nursing school?” he asked. Then when I told him about it, he said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right. Here it is September, and for the first time you’re not going back to school.”
As soon as I decently could, I went over to see Helga. She was preparing several large salmon for smoking. Hurrying over to me at once, skinny scratched legs showing beneath a gunny sack apron, her brown face broke into a smile.
I put my arms around her and cried, and so did she. It sounded rusty, as if she hadn’t cried for years and years.
Then we walked to the house where she made a pot of coffee, and while we were waiting for it, she brought out a tissue-wrapped parcel. It held a white cardigan sweater.
“For when you are being a nurse,” she told me, holding it up against me to measure the length. It is a beautiful sweater, of the finest white wool and every stitch perfect.
“Oh, Helga,” I said, “thank you! It’s the most beautiful sweater I’ve ever seen.”
“Yah,” she said matter-of-factly. “Is good. I make pattern from my own head. How long you stay?”
“Three days.”
“Will be finished. Yah, you take it back when you go.”
* * *
I hadn’t been back in Vancouver for more than a week when Mrs. Williams cam
e rapping at my door early one morning.
“Uhhh?” I managed through the fog of waking up.
“Your mother’s here,” she said. “I’m giving her a cup of tea in the kitchen. Come on, love, wake up!”
My mother! I looked around my room with a groan. It was a mess. Clothes everywhere. I kicked some shoes under the bed and hastily straightened the covers and bedspread.
My mother and Mrs. Williams were having a good chat. You’d think they had known each other for years. I filled a bowl with cornflakes, found an orange and sat down with them. But I was still blurred with sleep and had trouble following their conversation. It lapped around me like water.
“So what do you think of that, Sheila?” Mrs. Williams’ voice brought me back.
“Sorry—”
“Your mother selling her piano so that you’ll have the money for the tuition fee to nursing school.”
Both my mother and Mrs. Williams were smiling happily. They looked at me, waiting for my response.
“I wish...I wish you hadn’t done that,” I said, trying to sound more gracious than I felt.
“It’s done,” my mother answered. “I thought you’d be happy about this. She’s like her father that way,” she explained to Mrs. Williams. “I did and did for that man and never a word of gratitude.”
“It’s not that, Mom! It’s that the piano means so much to you!”
It was more than that. Having successfully interfered between Nels and me, how dared she interfere again in my life! Did she think that this would make up for what had happened?
“Besides, it’s too late to get into the September class now. It starts in a week. Registration’s closed. They’ll be filled up.”
“People drop out at the last minute. Why don’t you phone them and find out?”
I thought I might as well go through the motions to please her. I dialed the nursing school, asked for the Director of Nursing, and explained the situation.
“You are in luck!” The voice was clear, professional. It came over the receiver loud enough for both my mother and Mrs. Williams to hear. They sat up, alert, and looked pleased with themselves.
“I’ve just this minute put down the phone,” went on the Director of Nursing, “and one of the applicants has decided to go on to university instead. Now just let me check your application in the January file. Oh, yes, here it is. Sheila Brary. Yes, well, your marks are excellent. No problem there. Do you think you could get three letters of recommendation by Friday...”
My mother left soon afterwards.
“I have some shopping to do before I catch the evening boat home,” she explained. Then she counted out the hundred and ten dollars for the tuition. It was all in small bills, and she smoothed each one out carefully.
After she’d gone and Mrs. Williams and I were washing up the few dishes, Mrs. Williams turned to me.
“She’s a wonderful mother to have made that sacrifice for you.”
* * *
Before going in training, I made one more trip to the Landing to get the three letters of recommendation.
Now, in the middle of September, the Snow apples were ripe—huge, juicy, delicious. Red on the outside; inside their whiteness was veined with red. As I bit into one, the sharp, sweet, tangy taste seemed to me to capture the essence of the Landing—unique and beautiful.
One letter of recommendation was given to me by the school principal. The second one I got from the priest who has been newly appointed to the peninsula and who gave it to me not because he knows I have a good character but because he knows my mother has, and the third one was from Dr. Howard.
My mother seemed glad to see me. I found out that part of her good spirits was due to news she had. William Mann, her correspondence course instructor in Victoria, had sent her the addresses of two or three poetry magazines and had suggested she send some of her own poems to them.
She had sold two of them to Fiddlehead.
“I didn’t know you write poetry, Mom!”
“I used to. Before I met your father. Anyway, it was one of the assignments in the correspondence course.”
“They must be good to be published.”
“I have an idea for a children’s story that I want to try out. Mr. Mann said he would check it over for me when I finished, if I wanted him to.”
She looked happier and more alive than I’d ever seen her.
When I left on the boat for Vancouver, Tom saw me off. It’s something he never did ordinarily.
“Just imagine, Tom. I’m going back to school after all. Though I still wish Mom hadn’t sold the piano to pay my tuition.” The boat sounded its warning whistle.
Tom looked hard at me.
“Is that why you haven’t said anything to me? Not even thanks?”
“What are you talking about?”
Tom was slow to answer.
“I gave Mom the money to give to you. She sold the piano afterwards. It had nothing to do with you. She must have told you!”
“No.” I could hardly believe what he was telling me. They were beginning to pull in the gangplank. I had to run.
“I’ll write, Tom!” I stayed out on deck until I could no longer see his bright red sweater on the pier.
* * *
Nothing is simple, it seems. And no one can be completely understood. I think of my father and mother and their secrets.
Am I any different, really? Already I have secrets of my own, for no one else to know.
Maybe everyone has a secret. Maybe in this aloneness, everyone is the same.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
When Mary Razzell’s three children were in high school, she took a night school writing course offered by the Vancouver School Board and sold an article written in that class. Encouraged, she became a part-time student at the University of British Columbia and, in a tutorial with Carol Shields, wrote an adult novel, which was later rewritten as the young adult novel, Snow Apples.
Mary has a broad working background as a nurse, and she taught prenatal classes at Grace Hospital in Vancouver until her retirement in the 1990s. She is currently a third-year English major at the University of British Columbia.
Mary Razzell is the author of several young adult novels, including Salmonberry Wine (nominated for a B.C. Book Prize and the Geoffrey Bilson Award) and White Wave (also nominated for a B.C. Book Prize).
Snow Apples, her first novel, was nominated for a Governor General’s Award when it was first published in 1984. She has homes in Vancouver and on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast.