A Lady Under Siege

by B. G. Preston

  “Maybe. That would be good. Living a fiction is exhausting. But then you’re more practiced.”

  Seth made a face, exactly the kind of face she hated him making, the kind that said, that’s a low blow designed to hurt my feelings, and I think less of you for it. She wanted to shout fuck you at him, but of course, as she’d already pointed out, Betsy was likely to come bounding down the stairs any moment. Betsy, in fact, chose this moment to yell from the top of the stairs.

  “Mom! Who is it?”

  “Your father.”

  Silence.

  “Hi babe,” yelled Seth, with an enthusiasm so achingly fake any ten-year-old would see through it. They could hear Betsy come down the stairs, her footfalls heavy and slow.

  When she came in the kitchen she said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I just came by to talk to your mom.”

  Without sitting down, she flipped through a magazine on the kitchen table. “So talk.”

  “Well darling, it’s kind of like, very adult talk.”

  “About the divorce and stuff?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I can handle it, Dad.”

  “It’s just, I’d rather—look, I brought you a new soccer ball.” He pulled it from the shopping bag. “The official Olympic ball.”

  Betsy glanced at it and went back to pretending an interest in the magazine.

  “You like soccer, Bets, don’t you?”

  “I play soccer. You’re the one that likes it.”

  “Listen, Betsy, why don’t you take the ball out in the back yard and—”

  “Ha. Have you seen our back yard? It’s not even big enough for anything.”

  “Big enough to dribble a ball. See how long you can keep it in the air.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Seth’s voice turned suddenly unfriendly. “Betsy. Go outside. Five minutes, I have to talk to your mother.”

  Betsy looked from him to Meghan, who hesitated before taking sides.

  “It might be better, sweetie.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not going.”

  “Betsy, give us five goddamned minutes!” Seth blurted out.

  Betsy burst into tears. She strode past her father to the back door, threw it open, stepped out onto the deck, turned back and yelled at him. “Why can’t I hear?”

  “She’ll tell you about it soon enough,” said Seth. “It’ll be smoother this way.”

  “I don’t care about smoother!”

  He brought the ball to her, resting it like the world in his palm, but she swatted it away. It rolled back inside into the tangle of chair legs under the kitchen table.

  “Did it ever dawn on you that Mommy might like it better if she and I can talk alone for a minute? Think of mommy for a change.”

  “You think of mommy! You never think of mommy. You don’t even love her!”

  “Five minutes,” Seth insisted. He took the door handle and started to close it against her.

  “It’s my house, mine and mommy’s, and you’re pushing me out! It’s not your house, it’s mine!”

  “Yes. It’s yours,” Seth said sternly. “In five minutes it’ll be yours again. Outside. Please.”

  Betsy stepped out and slammed the door shut behind her as hard as she could. The whole house seemed to shake and reverberate. Meghan opened the door.

  “Darling, please. Five minutes. For me. Just to get him out of here. Then we’ll do something fun together.”

  “Like what?”

  “Whatever you want. You think of something. Take five minutes to think of something you’d really like to do.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  Meghan hated resorting to bribery, but sometimes it’s whatever works. She could see the wheels begin to turn in that ten-year-old head. “Good girl,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  8

  Betsy watched through the window of the deck door as her mom and dad moved from the kitchen into the living room.

  “Make her buy you a pony.”

  She turned. Her neighbour, the man Derek, was in his back yard watching her.

  “Don’t look at me,” Betsy said angrily.

  “Suit yourself.”

  He had a wrench in his hand, but the fence prevented her from seeing what he was working on. He bent down out of sight. She could hear hammering, metal on metal, then cursing. Then more banging, and a grunting noise, the sound a man makes when he can’t get a bolt to let go of its nut. “Fuck it,” she heard him mutter. Then, “Good enough.”

  Then he appeared again, looking at her from over the top of the six-foot fence, as if he were standing on a chair. “Come over here, would you?”

  She stood still. She had an urge to run back inside the house, but even at the tender age of ten she had her pride, and didn’t want to be dismissed as a child, they way her parents had just done. She wanted to stand her ground. He watched her, waiting for an answer. She stared back at him.

  “Cat got your tongue? What’s your name, anyway?”

  She almost said it, then didn’t.

  “Sorry, didn’t realize you were a mute,” he said.

  That got her back up. “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” she retorted, dressing the words in a child’s snobbery.

  “And why’s that?”

  “My mother doesn’t like you.”

  “Whatever. I’m difficult. Difficult to like, impossible to love, or so I’m told.”

  Betsy began to walk in tight circles on the wooden deck. Certain boards underneath her feet made different creaking sounds. She could play them like music. She stopped and looked at him.

  “How come you never go to work?”

  “Is that your question, or your mother’s? I don’t work. I don’t have to.”

  “Everyone has to work,” she told him.

  “Wrong. That’s what they want you to think. I have a little nest egg and I dole it out carefully. You can get by on almost nothing if you don’t worry about appearances. I call it creative indolence, or shabby happiness. I’m living it.”

  “It sounds weird,” said Betsy.

  “I disagree. I think the world is weird, and I’m the sane one. I’m centered, and consistent—compared to me, most people are bipolar.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s just a label. The whole world is bipolar, you see it within five minutes of turning on a TV. Two hundred people incinerate in a hideous plane crash, then zooooop, next second, you’re supposed to worry about how white your smile can be! Everyone’s expected to have the psychological resilience or appropriate brain chemistry to pull constant complete 180s on our emotions, well screw that, I can’t do it. I stay home, quarantine myself from the craziness, right? Stay above it. Stay high, you know what I’m talking about? I’m talking about alternate states of consciousness, which is meaningless to you because you’re still a child, and your consciousness is still growing, it’s elastic and malleable and unformed. Someday when you’re older you’ll go, ‘Shit, my consciousness is so fucking formed it’s gone stale, I wish I had an alternate,’ which is why grown-ups love alternate states of consciousness.”

  “You shouldn’t swear.”

  “Sorry. What’s your name again?”

  “Betsy.”

  “That’s old-fashioned. Heavens to Betsy.”

  “More like to hell with Betsy’s all I hear,” she said.

  Derek laughed. “That’s pretty sharp. But don’t pity yourself. You’re young and nimble, sweet and petite. Look at me. By comparison I’m old, slow, slovenly, and overweight. I should be complaining, not you.”

  “You are complaining.”

  “Good. Order has been restored. Now listen up. I want you to come down to the middle of your lawn, and stand just opposite me here. C’mon, you’ll like it!”

  She kept her arms stiffly at her sides to show her reluctance, but she did as he asked. He stepped off the chair he had been standing on, and disappeared behi
nd the fence. She could still hear his voice.

  “Are you facing the fence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  “No!” She giggled nervously.

  “Come on, Betsy. For the full effect you gotta close your peepers for a sec. Are they closed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep ’em closed.”

  “They’re closed.”

  Her ears were assaulted by a burst of unhappy metallic scrapes and squeals, and un-oiled springs stretching and straining.

  “Keep ’em closed!”

  “They’re closed, they’re closed!”

  “Okay, open ’em!”

  She saw the fence, and in midair above it, Derek suspended as if weightless for an instant. Then he fell to earth, or at least fell out of sight behind the fence, and the unseen springs shrieked again, and he shot back skyward to new heights, then fell again, and rose, fell, rose, and fell, again and again. For good measure with each rebound he attempted some kind of goofy pose—hands on hips, or thumbs in ears, or biceps curled like a body-builder. The whole thing was so unexpected that Betsy, entranced, giggled delightedly. Then suddenly he flew dangerously off kilter and sideways skyward, a panicked grimace on his face. “Oh shit,” he muttered, and plummeted down out of sight. She heard a soft thud as he hit the earth.

  Betsy rushed to the fence and tried to peek through the cracks. A knothole gave the best view—she saw a weathered trampoline, its skin stretched tight by equally aged springs, hooked to a base that might once have been painted blue.

  “You like it?” Derek asked. He was back on his feet, dusting himself off, looking a bit woozy.

  “I love it,” she squealed. “Where did you get it?”

  “It’s amazing what people throw out in the trash,” he replied. “It’s perfectly good, except where it’s broken. Not broken. Bent a little, I should say. Would you like to try?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “My mom would freak and have a heart attack and die.”

  “From a little old trampoline?”

  “No, from me going to your yard.”

  “No no, don’t worry about that, my dear. The toy is for you—I brought it home specifically with you in mind, because I’ve seen you wandering aimlessly around your patch of perfect lawn over there. You’re like some poor little waif in a children’s book praying for an imaginary friend to come along. Here’s my advice—keep hopping on this little number and chanting I think I can I think I can, next thing you know, you’ll be in orbit with the space shuttle. Or at least you’ll get some exercise, get the kind of colour in your cheeks all boys and girls your age and ethnicity should have. A girl like you should be ruddy-cheeked and ready to ride a balloon to the moon, right?”

  “I guess so,” she said. She wasn’t sure what he had in mind.

  “Stand back,” he said. “Way, way back. In fact, go up on the deck.”

  She did as told, and from there she could see him work. “See these planks?” he asked. “They’re two by tens, twenty-four feet long. Almost impossible to find such a thing anymore. People say my back yard is just junk, well I say look again.” He took the two planks and leaned them against the fence on a sloping angle, so that their midpoint was on top of the fence, like the midpoint of a teeter-totter. Grunting and cursing from brute effort, he slid the base of the trampoline onto the planks, then up the planks— with more grunting—until the whole thing teetered atop the fence. Then with a last Herculean push the planks tottered over, and the trampoline lumbered down them onto Betsy’s side, crash-landing in a flowerbed of yellow Lion’s Bane and purple Foxglove.

  “Don’t wreck the flowers!” Betsy screamed.

  “Too late for that,” he muttered. He climbed the stepladder against the fence and looked over to examine the damage. “It’s barely touched them,” he said proudly. “No harm, no foul—and more importantly, the brilliant part is, the thing looks absolutely level, perfectly placed for you to test it out. Climb aboard!”

  9

  Having banished Betsy to the deck, Seth and Meghan moved to the living room for their talk. “I hate having to raise my voice to her like that,” he said as he settled onto the couch. “But it’s the only thing that gets her attention. I’ve been very sharp with her at our place. The house, I mean. Used to be our place. I still call it that.”

  Meghan sat in a chair across from him. “She doesn’t like being there, she’s made that clear. It makes her feel creepy to be there and I’m not,” she said. “Her biggest complaint is when she tries to go to sleep at night she has to listen to you and your girlfriend in bed in the next room, giggling and God knows what else. Couldn’t you at least make sure she’s fallen asleep before you go at it?”

  “Yes, well, it’s a bit of a moot point, really,” said Seth. “Soon enough there’ll be plenty more night-time noises to disrupt her, because what I came by to tell you, in person, is, Irena is pregnant.”

  Seth was a professor of comparative literature at York University, and Irena had been one of his undergraduate students. She’d flirted with him, and he’d encouraged it, but had known better than to act on it while she was still enrolled in one of his classes. On the first day after term ended and the marks were in, she was at his office door. “Now you’re free to see more of me,” she’d said. Soon enough they were meeting almost daily, at his office, her apartment, even at the house near Lawrence and Yonge he and Meghan had bought with a generous down payment from his parents. Meghan never caught on—it was Irena who forced Seth’s hand, making him choose between her and his wife, and by that time he was addicted to her—the affair stirred his blood, and made him feel alive and virile. So Meghan moved out, Irena moved in, and he had a lot of explaining to do, to friends, family, and colleagues. He liked to say Irena was a “mature student,” all of twenty-six, so there could be no stigma about it. He was forty-one. And now he was going to be a father again.

  Meghan stared at him, but he avoided her eyes.

  “Oh Jesus,” she said.

  “Yep. We’re going to have a baby, we’re going to get married, the whole bit.”

  “You sound so enthused,” she said sarcastically.

  “I want to be. I should be. The timing’s not great.”

  “You stumble from disaster to disaster,” she said. “Or maybe you repeat things on a ten year cycle.”

  There did seem to be a pattern to it, or at least a repetition. A little more than a decade earlier, when Meghan was twenty-one and an undergraduate, she’d taken a course in creative writing at U of T, led by Seth, who was then a PhD student. He came from money, and seemed tremendously sophisticated, well-travelled and worldly to her, a girl from small-town eastern Ontario—Fenolen Falls to be exact. It was an evening class, and a bunch of students went out afterward to a place where undergrads shared pitchers of beer. Seth joined them, and talked almost exclusively to Meghan, and later took her back to his place, where they made sloppy, drunken love. Three nights later they did it again, only sober this time. Prior to this her love life had consisted of a few casual and unsatisfying dorm party hook-ups, so she was feeling like Seth was a major advance, a breakthrough—her first adult romance. They slept together twice a week for three weeks until she figured out he already had a girlfriend, and confronted him. “I’ve dropped her,” he said. “Oh? When?” “Now.” After that, they saw each other every night, and within two months Betsy happened—an accident, obviously. Seth expressed true love while lobbying for an abortion, and Meghan had agreed to it, had made the appointment, but at the last minute couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. And that’s how Betsy came to be.

  “Betsy’s not a disaster,” he protested. “You could say congratulations. She’s going to have a sister.”

  “Half sister.”

  “I want you and Irena to get along.”

  “I should be friends with the woman who destroyed my marriage.”

  “I destroyed o
ur marriage,” he said, looking at her finally.

  “Is that the new version? The first was, you were too weak, and she came on too strong. She did know you were married, even if you forgot.”

  “You’ll need to forgive her, and me. And in time you will. Give me some credit, I helped set you on your life’s path. You were just an aimless girl taking vague courses toward a useless degree, I’m the one who saw talent in your drawing and got you into OCA.” There was truth in this—prodded by Seth she had switched to the Ontario College of Art to study design and illustration, juggling classes and motherhood through her early twenties, while most of her peers were partying it up. But she was in no mood to give credit.

  “Thank you, Mister Svengali, I’d be nowhere without you.”

  They locked eyes for a moment. Seth looked away first. Being a man, he hated emotional scenes like this. He’d said what he needed to say, and was actually relieved when Meghan said, “You should go now.”

  She moved to the front door and opened it for him. On the doorstep he turned and said, “I think Betsy will like spending time with us, once she has a sister. More of a family environment.”

  “Goodbye.” Meghan slammed the door on him. She leaned her forehead against it, and composed herself. After a moment she walked back through the living room, and the phone rang. Without thinking she picked it up. It was work, more specifically her friend and workmate Jan, catching her up on the latest rumours about job cuts and rolling heads. Nothing new or substantial to report, just Jan venting, mostly, until she remembered the real reason she had phoned, that a meeting about a book cover Meghan was working on had been moved up to tomorrow. She’d need something to present by ten in the morning.

  “Can you do it?” Jan asked.

  “Yes of course. I’ll be up half the night though.”

  “Don’t kill yourself over it.”

  “I have better reasons to kill myself,” said Meghan. “Though I’d rather kill Seth right now.”

  That started a whole other conversation, and by the time she hung up the phone, and went to the kitchen and looked at the clock, she realised with a shock thirty minutes had passed. Betsy. Through the backdoor window she could see her daughter happily bounding up and down in the air. Up and down, on what? A trampoline. She opened the door and took in the sight of her neighbour Derek watching her daughter from his back yard. His elbows rested on top of the fence and he was drinking beer from a can.