She’s wrong—she’s not a bad mother. I just couldn’t say it again.
I walked all over town that evening, past the school, past the doctor’s office where Mom found out I was growing inside her and it was the worst and best day of her life. I walked past the grocery store. Three kids about my age were sitting on the curb out front digging into a box of Chapman’s ice cream with plastic spoons. They were huddled together, holding it above their feet, trying to finish it before it melted. I walked past them, close enough to touch them, but they didn’t notice. They were laughing, wincing with brain freeze, running their wrists across their chins to catch the drips.
We haven’t changed. She comes back from work smelling like grey processed cheese and I ask her how her day was. But now she just says, “Oh, fine,” and doesn’t tell me about the drama of the co-worker who is back in rehab or the guy who drove the loader into the wall so they couldn’t work for hours or Frances who keeps falling asleep standing up so Mom has to work her portion. She doesn’t tell me about those things, and I don’t rush home from school in case she’s off early. I don’t feel the need to tell her that Jennica is getting super close—and not in a good way—with the music teacher or that Mrs. Webb turns pink every time she has to say intercourse in sex ed.
Mom and I don’t talk the same and things don’t feel right. And I know I can make a baby. And I want one, so fucking bad.
PLOUGHSHARES INTO SWORDS
WHEN BILL’S WIFE DIED I knew that Jinny would marry him. Apparently at the wake when she stretched her long pale arms around his neck and leaned into his blotched red face he whispered in her ear, “Wait for me,” but not so quietly that Rosa Seemly didn’t hear. By the time she and I were in the church hallway wiping shortbread crumbs from our lips with one hand and holding teacups in the other, Rosa’d filled me in on it. “And the look on her face! She tried to look sad for him, but triumph—that girl feels triumphant now, is all I could think.”
And so when he called her up a month or two after the accident “just to talk,” she went over to his place and made him cocoa and sprinkled icing sugar on top of the brown foam, and he put the moves on her, just like that. Jinny told me she pushed his hand from her knee and he dumped his cocoa everywhere, and she said, “I’m not going to be your rebound girl. We’re too close for that. We’re going to do this the proper way.” And she got up and left with the promise that she’d be there for him once he’d sufficiently mourned.
So she was there the next week making bacon and eggs for brunch, and she made sure to put little bits of parsley in the eggs, just like her mom did when we slept over at her house as kids and talked about whether it was possible to stay in love with someone forever until we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore.
After that they weren’t officially together, but they were never really apart either.
We were all a little surprised that he hadn’t married her in the first place, seeing as they’d been such close friends all through high school. They never got physical or anything. But when we ate lunch spread out along the hill behind the school, he always made sure to smear a dandelion across her face that left a little stain like a token on her cheek before she’d shriek and throw a handful of grass at him. She made him little figurines of elephants and lions out of pipe cleaners and twigs, and once I noticed he’d taped them all over the inside of his locker door.
But she was maybe a little too headstrong for him. Francine was buxom with perfect curls and had that shyness that guys like in girls, the kind where she’s pretty and quiet and doesn’t ever need to say anything to draw attention to herself. Not that Jinny’s not nice to look at, but her chin juts out just a bit, and she’s almost as tall as him and if she weren’t smiling, you wouldn’t notice her in a crowd.
Besides, Bill was from a normal farming family and Jinny had always been an artist. In high school she sewed flags into her jeans and embroidered doves onto her shirts and after Bill taught her how to whittle, his hands around her hands as she wielded the tiny knife along a block of wood, she turned her desk into a labyrinth of flowers and birds. It was so beautiful the teachers couldn’t get mad, although they did start checking her knapsack for knives.
Now Jinny was a folk artist who made sculptures out of whatever anyone in the town considered junk—dented tin pots, worn-out tires, retired bicycles. People would drop stuff off at her place and leave it in her yard, offerings in hopes that she would create something else interesting for us to admire or roll our eyes at as we drove by.
So Jinny and Bill got married in May a year after Francine’s death and they just wanted a small event. She knit herself a white dress. The reception was in the church basement, which Jinny draped with colourful mesh and decorated with butterflies she made with vines and duck feathers. We in the Ladies’ Auxiliary made our cabbage rolls and angel hair pasta with meatballs. There was a skit set ten years in the future where the pastor dressed as Jinny and his wife as Bill and Bill-the-pastor’s-wife did all the cooking and Jinny-the-pastor stayed in pajamas all day yelling orders from the bed and it was all a good time. There was a lot of laughing and hollering and to look at Bill you’d never know he’d had such heartache.
We all wondered how Jinny would fare with the move. Over the years she had erected large figures all over her lawn—birds made of watering cans, giraffes made of brooms. She had an elephant made out of Mr. Pointer’s old claw-foot bathtub, garbage can lids as ears, a plastic tube for a trunk, all painted blue with bright eyes and a half-moon smile under its pickaxe tusks. She made a fence with log posts, each one painted with a chipper face, a little dress or suit, and some sort of hat no one in the town would be caught dead in. The kids liked to walk by after school and try to figure out which ones were their parents.
There were so many creations we wondered if, when she and Bill got married, she’d force him to move from his farm to her place so she wouldn’t have to part with all of her art.
But sure enough she moved into his big farmhouse, with the neat flower gardens that Francine used to care for flanking the house and surrounding the yard. Marigolds lined the edges and then there were black-eyed Susans and tiger lilies and zinnias and you name it. Jinny’s garden contained tea cups on iron stems and dragonflies made of driftwood.
Jinny waited till they were married to try selling her home. After all, she said, “There’s no way I’m moving in before the wedding.” She knew it would be a challenge to sell the house as is—the yellow siding painted with blue and red flowers, the interior just as ornate. “But heck, if I like it, someone else is bound to.”
“It’ll never sell, Jinny,” Bill told her. “You’ve done some lovely work on that place but it’ll never sell.”
It was during the second week back from their honeymoon to Stratford that Jinny came over to see me. She kicked off her boots at the door and I asked her if they had seen a play and if she liked the swans on the river. She said, “Yes to the first, and no to the second,” and then just stared down the table till I feared she would do it damage. I made the tea, and I didn’t think she was going to talk at all. It’s always a tough thing knowing whether to rant about your husband when you haven’t done it before, but once you practise a little, you figure it all out.
“I’m just . . . not used to it,” said Jinny. “Not used to making life work with someone else. And her eyes—that woman’s eyes all over the house in little pictures drives me batty. Thank God they didn’t have any kids so I don’t also have their big, sad, guilt-mongering eyes to look at all the time.” She sighed deeply and I jingled the tiny silver spoon around in my ceramic mug.
Turns out Bill had never stopped loving Jinny. “He told me a month after she died,” she said, pressing her finger against tiny bits of sugar around the sugar jar, then licking them off her fingertip. But what was she supposed to do with that, she wanted to know.
“I mean, at first it was all romantic. I was the one the whole way along and he just made a mistake. A big old mistake and
now things can be the way they should have been all along.”
And that’s the way she kept thinking all through their courtship. What else could she think? She was in love, again, and all that anger she had felt on account of him marrying wrong could be forgiven.
“But forgiving is harder than all that,” I ventured, running my finger along the embossed top of the tiny spoon. Funny things, little spoons. Good for nothing but putting bits of sugar in your tea, and looking cute.
“No, that’s not it,” she said. “The forgiving was hard, but I did it years ago. And besides, back then I wasn’t ready to be married. I pushed him away—not with my words, but with my attitude. Like a cat that wants you to pet it but goes and hides under the cabinet. There’s only so long you can kneel at the cabinet holding sardines before you give up and eat the sardines yourself.” She had run out of sugar granules on the table, so she poured herself another cup of tea and lazily dumped two more heaping spoonfuls of sugar into her cup, making sure to spill some on the way.
“It’s not the forgiveness. It’s the question of, what was she to him then? Was she second best, and he was still thinking of me the whole time as the best? Every time she nagged or was dull or didn’t laugh at a joke or wasn’t good in bed, did he think, Well, if only I was with Jinny. And now that there’s no more if-only, can I live up to that? Or will someone else become the if-only?
“And what if we had done it right the first time, and the cat had not hidden under the cabinet but jumped on his lap and ate the sardines out of his hand—would Francine then have been the if-only?”
I couldn’t quite follow all this but I thought it best to nod my head and listen. Usually if you listen well people wrap themselves up in their own conclusions anyway.
But she didn’t. She didn’t answer herself, and she didn’t look at me for an answer. It was like she wanted to sit there in “if only” and wonder it away.
“Well, if you’ve forgiven,” I finally said, “I guess all is well. You get to start fresh as man and wife. Nothing before this or after this matters.” She nodded while she drew lines through the spilled sugar, watching her finger skim a continuous figure eight.
“He wants me to keep up the gardens,” she said finally.
“Well, marriage is all about sacrifice, isn’t it?” I offered.
“Yup. And I’m not good at sacrifice.” She sighed deeply. I felt her eyeing the teacup and thinking about what kind of creation she could make out of it. “But I’m determined to be. Never do anything half-ass and I’m not about to start.”
A week later I was driving back from the market and saw Bill out there at Jinny’s house. I wouldn’t have been able to see him in front of all those sculptures if he hadn’t been standing on a ladder, a fat paint roller in his hand. The blue and red flowers on the siding were vanishing under stripes of dull beige.
I pulled my car up beside the chipper fence.
“Just doing some painting, Bill?” I said.
“Just trying to make things presentable,” he said without turning to me.
“No one wanted to buy it as is?” Now that I was close I could see the flowers peeking out from beneath the first coat. It would take a while to cover those up.
“Who would? Didn’t even bother putting it on the market till we painted.”
“What about all these friends out here on the front lawn?” I said.
“Oh, God knows,” Bill said. “One step at a time.”
I left feeling a little melancholy about all those flowers being done away with, so I swung by the farm to check up on Jinny.
She was outside in the gardens. In her wide hat and floral print coveralls, she looked like one of her fence-post characters.
“What are you up to?” I said as I got out of my car.
“Sacrificing,” she said. “Is this one a weed?” She pointed to a green scraggly thing.
“That would be, yes,” I said. “Guess a lot cropped up since Francine was here, eh?” I said. Jinny glared at me. “Well, no sense in pretending she wasn’t here,” I said.
“He likes the gardens so that’s what I do.”
“How’s your house selling?”
“Oh, not well. But Bill’s taking care of the selling. Kind of him to settle the details. I can’t handle giving it up.” She wiped the back of a dirty glove across her forehead.
“Well, Bill seems to think it’ll sell better now that he’s painting it,” I said.
“Now that he’s what now?”
“Just passed him out front of your house painting,” I said, and Jinny’s face fell.
How it is people marry having never talked about these sorts of things I don’t understand. Except that I think in the whirlwind of love and second chances we can become so afraid of setting off the balance that we convince ourselves that becoming one means we’ll always want the same things.
Jinny stood there for a minute frowning at me or the sun, strangling the limp weed in her fist. Then she turned on her heels and ran towards the barn. It was past time for me to go, and as I walked towards my car Jinny blew past me on her bicycle.
I backed the car out of the driveway, and thought I owed it to them both to stop by Bill again on the way home. I didn’t even get out of the car, just pulled up alongside the magical little yard and rolled down my window.
“Bill,” I called, and he turned to me. “I don’t like to mess, but I think I might have just inadvertently let your wife know something I thought she already knew, something quite frankly she should have known. And so I thought I’d just tell you she’s on her way over.”
Paint dripped from the roller down his wrist. I saw his lips move, mumbling something.
“What’s that?” I called and turned off the car.
“She said she didn’t want anything to do with the selling of it—said I should just take care of things.” He wasn’t angry. “I thought once the place sold it wouldn’t matter to her what colour it was.”
I sighed. “It’s still hers.”
Jinny pulled into the driveway on her bike, skidding in the gravel.
“Hello, darling,” Bill said hopefully, waving at her with the paint roller. Jinny ran up to him, grabbed the bucket of paint and doused him in it. He stood there sputtering while it dripped down his chest and pants.
Having made such a mess of the situation, the next day I thought I had better check up on them. When I pulled into the farmhouse driveway, I was greeted by an army of thirty or so tin and wooden and steel creatures, their barbed-wire and garden-hose arms bearing garden tools that they raised threateningly towards the house.
Bill came out before I could pull away.
“What a sight to wake up to,” he said. He sauntered over to the nearest figure and patted it on the head. Its soldered steel eyebrows glowered at him.
“And they shall turn their pruning hooks into swords,” I said.
Bill chuckled. Then he said, “She stayed at her place last night. Only a month in, and already—”
“You knew who she was when this started,” I said. “You knew it fifteen years ago.”
“I know.” He shook his head. “I just . . . I thought it was because she’d never settled down.” He took the rake out of the angry creature’s hand. “I thought she made them because she was bored. Out of loneliness.”
I walked through the brown and grey menagerie with him. I stopped at a particularly endearing creature, its button eyes and curved spoon mouth making it melodramatically quizzical.
“With Francine,” he said, “things were easy. She was peaceful, simple.”
“Then why did you love Jinny all along?”
“I guess sometimes simple was boring. And now exciting is difficult. We knew what we were doing the first time around,” he said.
Jinny moved back into her house. She painted the red and blue flowers back along the siding—they were never truly gone to begin with. Bill helped her open a folk-art store, because Lord knows the woman couldn’t operate a business on her
own. Some nights she stays with Bill, other nights he stays with her. His yard is tidy and he has learned to garden, though there are a few teacup flowers and hula-hoop butterflies among the plants now, and one little tin and wooden creature who hands him his rake.
HOLY OIL
WE WERE PLAYING FORT, AND I was telling Danny what to do because I was good at it. “The square cushions go on the sides and the cushions with the endy things go at the front and back.” He should have known all this by now, but he was usually too angry to remember things.
“And then you need to use the chairs with the hole at the top for the sides so that you can pull the blanket through, and the red foldy ones go at the back.” As I tried to stretch the blanket across the back of both chairs, he climbed underneath and into the middle. “Hey—you’re not allowed in until it’s done!” I yelled to him. He kicked down the couch cushion walls.
I yelled at him for a while and tried to tie him up in the blankets. He wriggled out and I pinned him against the floor. “Clean it up.”
And then he did the thing he does: took a deep breath and screamed for as long as he could, took another deep breath and screamed again. Once, when Grandma had sent him to his room for pulling the shiny dark ribbon out of my Sharon, Lois & Bram cassette tapes, he screamed for thirty minutes straight. I held him pinned for three half-minute screams, his face turning the colour of the rims of Mom’s eyes, and then I sprang up and let him run from the room.
The outside door slammed and I thought it was Danny till I heard Mom holler, “I’ll be needing those cushions back on the couch for my shows!” She was back from her shift and switching off with Grandma, who would sit in the kitchen and read while Mom was out. Occasionally Grandma would throw a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli on the stove and then glower at us while we dug our spoons into speckled grey mugs. I imagined the specks added flavour, though I knew they made the mugs ugly.
“What the heck are you doing inside on a sunny day anyway?” Mom called. I kicked over another chair and grabbed a couch cushion in each hand.
The Whole Beautiful World Page 6