Glass Voices

by Carol Bruneau

  “A special gift for that special guy?” The salesman grins flirtatiously, never mind that he’s young enough to be her grandson.

  “A bed jacket, perhaps.” She blushes—wishing she could play along?

  His brow furrows; heavens, he has it down to a science. “A smoking jacket? Hm. Let’s see.” It has satin lapels and a little faux cravat. Forget Dan Rowan, Hugh Hefner look out! She can just imagine Jewel’s reaction. Ridiculous, but she buys it anyway. Rebecca will be so proud of her.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you, dear. Ma’am. Sorry,” he says, “I get it from my mom.”

  Buoyed by her purchase, she rides the escalator to the second floor. There’s another hour to pass till the bus home. Browsing in yard goods, she checks fabrics for their grain, cottons leaving a fishy smell on her fingers. She studies the latest in notions, pausing to flip through patterns. The books make her think of atlases, strange countries where giraffe people lounge around, bored but graceful. Some geography, she can’t help thinking, the rift between these pictures and her own puckered stitches. Looking makes her hungry.

  Finding the restaurant means passing through linens and home electronics, where a man and two little girls cuddle, watching a big TV, which, if not for the rabbit ears, resembles something for storing dishes. Above the rattling voices drifts music, if you can call it music, the stuff Robert likes, best compared to screeching tires, hammers and drills. There are other purchases she should make; items come to her all the time while she’s changing Harry’s sheets, rinsing his basin, grinding his food up—like baby crap, Robert says. But now that she’s here she can’t put her finger on a single thing.

  A gold cord marks off the restaurant’s entrance, and a sign on a chrome stand lists the special. Thankfully, the letters on it are big enough to read: soup, sandwich, Jell-O, coffee/tea. A cafeteria is more like it: almost empty, the place makes the Armcrest seem luxurious. A single customer perches on a stool at the end of the counter.

  “You want may-naaze?” the waitress says when she places her order, plunking down a cup and a dish of bright green Jell-O. Juggling her tray, Lucy manoeuvres to a table by the door, hanging everything but her hat on the wobbly coat tree. It’s then that she sees who’s at the counter. Hunched over her soup, Miss Van Buskirk hasn’t bothered removing her coat, her purse either. She’s still got it strapped on. The coat’s sleeves are pulled up, enough to show orange cuffs underneath.

  The bones in the salmon salad resemble a baby’s molars, Lucy observes, averting her eyes as the woman, Benny’s friend after all, upends the bowl to drink the dregs. And the flecks of black skin mixed with pink remind her of a cat’s maw, as the cleaning lady dabs her mouth, the way Father Langille does after draining the chalice at Communion. If she’s felt any urge to speak or offer the woman something, the feeling’s passed. When she glances up from dessert, to her relief and her guilty regret, Miss Van Buskirk is gone.

  “Don’t borrow trouble,” she hears herself murmur; good heavens, talking to herself in public, aloud! All the trouble she needs, having Harry on her plate. Trying not to think of him badgering for cigarettes, she lets a spoonful of Jell-O dissolve on her tongue, quarrying the last of it from under its squiggle of Dream Whip.

  It’s good to get out, Rebecca’s coaxing comes back. For God’s sake, Ma, your life isn’t over. Yet. Reluctantly, yet anxiously, she slips on her coat, sliding a quarter under her saucer. Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your children alone, a Maggie Muggins voice from nowhere sings—off that kiddies’ show Robert used to watch. But then a priestly voice inside her soothes, He leadeth me beside the still waters, and despite a gnawing worry, she stops for a browse through linens. What a comfort examining sheets, flowered ones that smell of manufacture—not the productivity she’s used to: functions, bodily ones, Harry’s. Fingering them, she imagines lying in a bed of daisies lifted off the sheets, a field of them waving; then, tasting Jell-O, God forbid, hears herself murmur aloud again: “Maybe six feet under, dolly.”

  “What?” It must be bad if someone responds. And there she is, Benny’s friend, stretched out on a bed not far away, a high, narrow one designed for a princess, done up in sheets with hot pink roses. At least she’s had the decency to slip part of a newspaper under her boots—the Classifieds?

  “Excuse me?” Plucking at her necklace, the saleslady looks stricken. Her tone makes Lucy freeze. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Excuse me,” Miss Van Buskirk mimics, saucing the woman. There’s the rustle of plastic as she gets up, and a loud sigh. “You wouldn’t talk like that if you knew who my father was.” My father, la-de-da, the way Margaret Drysdale would say to Jed Clampett.

  Pretending to price towels, Lucy slips to the next aisle, barely feeling the terry under her palm. All she can think of is the newspaper clipping, trying to recall a blur of faces: the yellowed, almost featureless ones of that family with the dead father. But the only things that come back, however vaguely, are the teenaged girl looking rebellious, and the hoity-toity, put-upon look of the mother.

  “Don’t let it happen again,” the salesclerk’s voice carries. “Or I’ll call security. Tony,” she adds, as if giving a name heightens the threat. But as Lucy hurries away, she hears laughter and a mocking “Tony who? The Tiger?” flung right back. Heaven knows what Benny would do, if he were lurking. File a knife on the lady’s teeth?

  ON THE RIDE HOME, SHE spots Robert walking towards town with some kids, his arm around someone, a girl. Impossible to tell if it’s Sheryl, the bus races by so fast, and they all look the same, teenagers strung across the shoulder as if gearing up for a game of Red Rover. It’s stopped snowing, but even so they’re hardly dressed right, their jeans sweeping the gravel. Shouldn’t they be in class? Straining forward, she asks the driver for the time. It’d be nice if Robert would drop by to visit. She’d even keep her mouth shut about school. “You got the money honey,” the driver quips, and wouldn’t it be nice if all young men could be this cheerful? “I got the…Hap-past two, ma’am.”

  “Oh my Dinah,” she murmurs, thanking him. Not that she’d want him for a grandson.

  1954

  SOMEONE’S IN THE KITCHEN I know-whoa-whoa-whoooooooa. Can’tcha hear the whiffle blowin’, wise up so early in the born. Some days Robert would never be still, from the moment his mom dropped him off to when she picked him up. Rebecca’d trip over herself making Lucy feel appreciated. But when Lucy’d offered to babysit, she hadn’t meant adoption. Harry would just grab his lunch pail and tell them to have fun. At the age she’d been then, fifty-seven, the last “fun” she’d wanted was chasing a three year old.

  The child an octopus, that many hands, into everything: Harry’s tools, her sewing machine. My ma lets me use her scissors, he’d say, then pester for some coffee! A witto bit, he’d say, then want to try out Harry’s fiddo. All the livelong day, How come this and Why that. When Harry came home from work he’d think Hurricane Hazel had blown through. They didn’t know the first thing about discipline, Jewel and Rebecca. But then the world was a different place, she and Harry would actually agree, though people were pretty much the same, and kids needed direction. His lips would still curl when he found peanut butter on his violin. But he’s so cute, she’d rush to smooth things over.

  Cute as a goddamn chimpanzee, one that picks pockets. And had a motor mouth and ears that missed nothing, plus enough toys to amuse ten kids. More than once she almost killed herself slipping on marbles, but that was nothing compared to the time she found him trying to use the rabbit ears for swords. One morning he’d pulled a homemade slingshot out of his pajama bag. She’d barely had time to wash her face, Rebecca arriving early, a buxom Judy Holliday, all made up as usual. Later, just when she thought he was winding down for a nap, slumped in a chair for a rest, she’d watched him raise the weapon, squinting like a hunter. Lulled by the TV, she didn’t see him aim,
his sights fixed on an imaginary bird. Helena’s pink baby cup had teetered for a second, the ammunition—a marble—pinging inside. Mercifully, it didn’t break, but she’d counted out loud to resist spanking him. Though Rebecca shrugged it off. What was the use, anyway, of a cup with no saucer?

  Hell on wheels, Harry called him. Hell in size three Buster Browns. But then the boy practically strangled her with his hugs, licking her cheeks—Doggy kisses, Gwamma!—and singing in her ear: I been working on the wailwoad, all the wivelong day.

  REBECCA MEETS HER ON THE stairs, already in her coat, a tight-fitting belted thing so short it can’t possibly be warm. “Sorry, Ma,” she apologizes, saying that Robert will turn the place into party central if she’s not there right after school. “Neighbours’ll be callin’ the cops,” she jokes, quipping, “You leave anything for me to buy?” as if that one bag contains the store. “Got your head out of heaven long enough to indulge, I see.” Heaven? Before she can show off the smoking jacket, Rebecca’s out the door.

  Upstairs, poor Harry gestures wildly for the bedpan. She has to move the Don Noble first, stretched as it is across the spread, covering the large pink spot that’s replaced the tomato stain. It’s like stuffing something into a suitcase. “There. Feel better, dear?” But it’s hard not to let resentment creep in. “I don’t suppose Rebecca remembered your pill.” Opening the little plastic box, a reminder, in spite of everything, that Rebecca’s more on the ball than she sometimes seems, Lucy does a quick count. The blue pills, his muscle relaxants, seem low. A shake of the vial on the dresser confirms it. But Harry’s oblivious.

  “Bucky was here,” he spells out on the pantyhose card, a fresh one that Rebecca lettered.

  “Robert?” she prompts. Lord, if someone doesn’t call him by his name, they’re liable to forget it!

  Kids, Harry spells out determinedly, Bunch. Which reminds her of the swarm she’s just seen on the road, their ratty jeans and stringy hair. “They were here to see you? All of them?” Sounding unsure is too often taken as doubting his brain. But he simply shakes his head, spelling out Beck. “Sent them packing, did she? Well. It was sweet of Robert to drop by.” A pang of jealousy creeps in; why couldn’t he come while she was here, too? Never mind, she thinks, a response that’s as automatic as breathing; atomic, as Rebecca would’ve said, once upon a time.

  Downstairs, she checks the shelf with Harry’s other pills, a forest of vials; maybe she’s imagining it, but the rest seem low as well. Not that she’s great at counting, but there’d been seven blue ones, she could’ve sworn: one for each day of the week, and now just a few. Good Mother, it strikes her, the old slip-knot of fear tightening inside: had Rebecca accidentally doubled his dose? Rebecca and her foolish advice: Shopping will set you free, Ma. Yes, God forbid, while the brains dried up in their heads!

  Hurrying upstairs, she studies him so closely that Harry flares his nostrils, scowling. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” Fine, he spells, tapping the card. Now.

  Then she spies the cleaning book on her dresser, forgotten in Rebecca’s rush to escape? “Oh, but Rebecca means well,” she remarks absently, thinking more, though, of the book’s owner; and, as if Harry’s not there, “and the road to you-know-what is paved with good intentions.” When he wags his head, she teases, “Don’t tell her I said.”

  The book makes her uncomfortable, as if Miss Van Buskirk herself hunkers in its pages. Ignoring it, she stumps downstairs for the newspaper, which Rebecca’s left on the table. Glory, December 6th: how has it come and she’s forgot? The headline blares dully, the same as last year’s and the year before, and the year before that, predictable as rain, reminding everybody of what anyone who was there would rather forget. The fifty-second anniversary. There’s a photo of a white-haired lady reminiscing, pointing to the lightning bolt scar above one eyebrow. The old, dreadful ache comes back, like something falling out of a drawer; but then she could kick herself. Jewel’s birthday! Here she’s been out shopping and hasn’t even twigged to it. No wonder Rebecca was keen to have her go; she’ll really think she’s senile, having let such a thing slip her mind. Too late. She can hardly leave Harry to pop out again.

  As if in penance—will it ever go away, this urge to atone for every little lapse?—she skims the front page. Always the hope, however sketchy, however foolish, of discovering something she hasn’t heard or read before: a raw wish that even at this age makes her ever hopeful. The paper never fails to dig up a new tale each year, things trotted out that she can barely stand to imagine or relive. As long as there are survivors, there will be stories…though it stops her breath to think of herself that way, a survivor, like someone washing up from the ocean.

  Harry will want to see the paper, of course; between supper and TV the highlight of each evening is picking his way doggedly towards the obits. If my name’s not there I know it’s a good day, dolly, he always used to say; and it’s true, perusing that page has become dessert in a perverse sort of way. The news the first course, the pot roast and vegetables, he likes to take his time pointing out things for her to read aloud. But not today, especially not today, the cocktail of drugs and his weakness rendering Harry one weeping wound barely scabbed over. Who can bear to open it up? Not even bothering to check the weather page or the death notices, she tucks the paper into the garbage.

  “The boy forgot to bring it,” she says, its absence leaving no less a hole in the evening. Waiting for Laugh-In, worn out by one-sided conversation, she makes herself open the stain book. Rebecca appears to have claimed it. Notes in the margins in her hand; maybe Benny’s friend has passed it on—in exchange for what? she wonders. If you knew who my father was, you wouldn’t talk like that…Finding her glasses, she browses to pass time; the book is not without its good bits. Follow the jingle, reads one entry: Wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday, mend on Wednesday, upstairs Thursday, downstairs Friday, bake on Saturday, church on Sunday. Turn it around any way you want, but do have a plan. Right, she thinks with satisfaction. It’s not so much about dealing with messes as preventing them: words to live by. A bible for day-to-day dirt, though the league ladies might well call that blasphemy.

  She puts the book aside when Harry taps the bedside clock, and on goes the TV. Chortling along through the show, his laughter reminds her of someone choking to death. Yet his eye brims with glee; and the sight brings relief, and briefly her feeling of being imprisoned lifts. As if it doesn’t matter so much, looking after a man who can’t really talk and won’t walk again. A child who, instead of growing up, will need her more and more. Yet the thought of the room without him in it hums like a test pattern, a sound that would drive a person crazy if it persisted.

  When the credits roll, she turns down the volume, his cue that it’s time to take care of his needs, as she puts it, hoping he’ll be asleep before the local news comes on—not that the TV is as bad as the paper for digging up dead bones. Once his teeth are brushed, his face washed, the bedpan rinsed, she kisses him. “Night night, my darling,” she barely has the energy to murmur, stumbling off to bed.

  In spite of herself—and the guilt it breeds over how she’s let the house go, the days eaten up with tending Harry—she takes the cleaning book with her. It actually makes good reading, an encyclopedia with no thread to be followed. Like the Book of Proverbs, open it anywhere and something new jumps out, or, even if it’s old hat, acts as a reminder. Cleanliness is next to godliness, she tells herself, entries catching her weary eye, then falling away, dropped stitches as she turns pages. The comfort of being told what she already knows or suspects. How to clean eye glasses, for instance: use warm water and soap. Felt: steam and a brush. Then the odd yet familiar tidbit, like preventing rust using lard and rosin (!), interspersed with the deadly: how to kill moths with paradichlorobenzene. Was that anything like the stuff that’d fallen from the sky that day fifty-two years ago? In her exhaustion, she half-imagines Harry rosining his bow with it.

 
Time to sleep, but as she pushes the book aside, the clipping slides out. The creases in it are almost furry, worn through in spots. Imagining its odd yet oddly familiar owner tucking it there for safekeeping, adjusting her glasses she can’t help but peruse it with new interest, interest in the form of a queer, unsettled sympathy. Apple baron, indeed; an image creeps back of bread bags, boots on newsprint, a bed too pretty to sleep in. My father… Yet here it is, laid out in all its details but the loudest one screaming to be explained or at least mentioned—never mind the wealth, the wife named Alice, the orchards, hills, dales and rolling countryside. What’s missing is how “prominent Valley farmer and businessman John Van Buskirk” died. A large house in the hamlet of Coltsfoot, population sixteen swelling to thirty-five during harvest season. A tragic loss, not just to family, but the entire Valley and the industry as a whole, not to mention the province…Yes, yes, she thinks: the comfort and the frustration of reading things you already know, or, if you have half a brain, can assume. But died at home is all that’s said of what happened forty years ago, if she can trust the clipping’s date, and God forbid the paper lies! A knowing voice knocks inside her head, Rebecca’s or one of the league ladies’, almost catty, suggesting that in the obituaries anyway dying at home means by your own hand.

  Lordie. A weary body is some vehicle for a weary imagination, and wearier memories! Times in her life her mind could’ve driven her off the rails, and, as if it happened yesterday, the weight of stones comes back, and the Arm’s icy water ringing her thighs. She braces herself as Harry moans from his bed, the flash of the TV lighting the doorway. It would be a venial sin to get up and close the door. As long as she knows he’s comfortable…and mercifully, his moaning stops, replaced by a whistling snore; as she resumes reading, some lines about the daughter, Miss Elinor Van Buskirk, catch her eye. They send her spirits downstairs where the garbage waits to be put out. Fourteen-year-old Elinor, the story prattles on, adopted after being orphaned in the Halifax disaster. Lucy can almost picture the person typing it; a man most likely—aren’t all newsmen male?—though it’s just as easy to imagine a gossipy lady recounting bits and pieces, a lady not so different from Rebecca, or the league women. A miracle child, the family called her, the toddler discovered without a scratch, under an ash pan one full day after the catastrophe. No, not a nurse, she thinks: Rebecca would’ve made an ace reporter. Except the typing part; she’d never manage with those nails.