Our table was under a dirty window that looked out at gulls drifting on strong currents of sea air, and after we ordered, we turned from each other to watch the movement of the birds and waves. In this cushion of quiet, with the ocean spread out like a moving sheet of diamonds, Natalie said, without preamble, “I feel at this time in my life a need for happiness”. She wore her hair, now blonde and long, in a ponytail so that when strands broke free and fell in her face she’d pull them behind her ears, which were tiny and pale as shells.
“Of course that’s true,” I said. “But what about Sam?” Sam was Natalie’s seven-year-old daughter. “How happy is she?”
“Don’t you think I’ve thought of that?” she turned to look at me, her voice now alert. “You know, you’re really becoming judgmental.” At that moment the waitress, a young woman dressed in shorts, sandals and a T-shirt, placed our meals on the table—pasta and seafood for me and breaded shrimp for Natalie.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to,” I said. “But Mom’s so upset, that’s all.”
After lunch we walked on the boardwalk, looking out to the ocean, listening to the music and laughter wafting from the carousal of the amusement park and the sea lions barking from the lattice of beams below us. We talked about our mother who’d begun a new job, working as a sales clerk in the drapery department of a large store downtown and how she was coping with my brother, Stevie, who lived with her after his hospitalization for a mental breakdown. When I finally gathered my courage and broached the subject of Natalie’s divorce, she told me that she was just so unhappy with the routine of a housewife, that it seemed as if life was passing her by. Despite the sense of goodwill that had been part of the day, that had made it easy to laugh and talk, there was now irritation in her voice when she spoke of her life with Johnny. She leaned against the rail, turned her face into the wind so that her hair whipped the air like angry ribbons.
Natalie’s apartment was accessed through a long veranda lined with baskets of hanging begonias and urns of roses on trestles. It was scented by a perfumed breeze that moved in during late afternoon and walking along the veranda, we could smell roses and feel the cool of the approaching night on our bare arms. As we neared Natalie’s door we could hear Johnny speaking loudly to the neighbour who had been minding Samantha. “Good,” he said when he saw us, “can you tell this person that as the father I can take my own daughter.” I had not seen him since he was home at Christmas five years earlier, when I was still a teenager and I noticed he’d gained weight which gave him a substantial, prosperous air. Dressed in a suit with the tie pulled open, against his tan his teeth gleamed white. When he noticed me, he gave me a slow smile and said in an altered, softened voice, “Well, look, it’s kiddo.”
“It’s okay, she can go with him,” Natalie said to the woman in the doorway, while looking between Johnny and me. “Sorry I forgot to tell you he’d be over to pick her up tonight.” Samantha came out on the veranda, glancing back at the woman who was gathering her purse and sweater and said, “See I told you,” taking her father’s hand. She was a clever child who stood alert but quiet as Johnny spoke with me. “Any chance you can come over, maybe have a meal?”
“I don’t know when that will be,” my sister said before I could speak. “We’re supposed to go away to the beach tomorrow and won’t be back until a day before she’s leaves.” Johnny’s gaze moved from me to her, but he gave no acknowledgment that she has spoken. “Well, kiddo, give me a call before you leave. If there’s any chance, I’d love to see you.” He leaned over and kissed my cheek, “Your Mom okay?”
“You know, you don’t have to wait until my sister’s here,” Natalie said as she bent down to kiss her daughter goodbye, “You can ask me about Mom anytime.”
After they left, she said, “Why does he do that? Like I’m invisible.”
“I don’t know, maybe he still cares. You can’t blame him for that,” I said, as we unpacked the groceries.
Her movements became brisk and she clanged the cutlery as she arranged it on the table. “You’re young, you know, you haven’t been married, so all I’ll say is ‘just wait’.”
When she put a vase of daisies, cold cuts and salads on the table and then opened a bottle of wine without speaking to me, I said, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, but it must be hard for him that’s all, I mean you left, anyone would have trouble with that.”
“But what you don’t understand, what is never said, is that I left for a reason.” She put the wine bottle down on the table between us. “It wasn’t a whim. I was deeply unhappy.” Her feet in their sandals looked compact and perfect, like the feet of angels carved in stone. Her brow was pinched, her stance defiant and beauty, ephemeral as perfume, seemed to radiate from her like heat. When the doorbell rang, she turned from me and said, “That must be Ron”.
When she opened the door he said, “For my girls,” holding up a bottle of wine. A boyish looking man in his mid-forties, he wore a plaid shirt and jeans with a crease down the center of each leg.
When we were alone in the kitchen after dinner my sister said, “Since he left his wife, he’s been living with his parents, and his mother does his ironing.” She was leaning against the counter, drinking wine and watching me scrape the plates into the garbage bin. “She’d dress him in a little sailor’s outfit if she could.” I straightened, laughed and lifted my glass, clinking it against hers, “To your happiness, sister” and her smile faded slightly but she returned the clink.
“Yes, to happiness,” she said.
Later in the evening when the conversation turned to Canadian winters, she said to me, “God, remember that night when we were stuck in a snow storm on St. Laurent Boulevard? Remember how cold it was?” Ron had never lived in a place where the snow stayed longer than a day and because whatever Natalie said interested him, he asked questions about the storm. She told him how the tow truck arrived, about the man whose job it was to roam around in the night helping people, and how grateful our mother had been to see us by the end of the evening. While she spoke, I remembered sitting between her and Johnny as it became colder and quieter. “Oh yeah, it was terrible, I thought we were going to die out there in that car,” she said.
“I didn’t know that,” I said and she gave me an annoyed look.
“You were a kid, what, six, what would you know?”
She was leaning across the table, her eyes clear; the glow from the overhead lamp highlighted her cheekbones and soft lashes. “You know what I kept thinking, strangest thing,” she said looking at me as if the memory had just struck her, and perhaps it had. “I kept thinking if something happened to you, how angry your Dad would be.”
“Really, but he was dead by then.”
“I know, weird, eh? I didn’t think about myself or even Mom, just him.”
Ron was watching her and smiling. “Was she always like this?” he asked me. “Always so concerned about you, her little sister?” Before I could respond he reached across the table, took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers.
“All I remember is being relieved when the car finally started and we were able to go home,” I said. But there was more I remembered: the silence in the car before the man arrived to help us, the cold that made my feet numb and the tight way Natalie held me once the car started to move.
z
On a cold day in January 2006, I picked up my sister at the airport. Our mother, who’d been living in a seniors’ residence and then a nursing home, had taken what the doctors referred to as a turn for the worse. When I spoke with Natalie two days earlier, I pictured her on the back deck of her Los Gatos home and imagined the sun and heat caught in the yard, warming the palm trees and flowers and settling on the orange tree by the side of her house. It was the home she shared with her fourth husband who spent most of his time in a room referred to as the games room. I had visited her once at this house. “So what’s the problem?” she ask
ed when I called. I told her what the doctor had said, about the marrow of our mother’s bones no longer capable of making white blood cells. She asked questions I’d not thought to ask the doctor and then waited for a response, finally agreeing to come as soon as she could arrange a flight. “Do you think Frankie should come with me?” she asked, but before I could answer, she said, “I’ll just wait and see.”
Two days later at the airport, I stood behind the partition with a group also waiting for passengers. We were dressed in heavy coats, unbuttoned in the heat of the airport, mitts and toques protruding from our pockets like tongues.
“God, it’s bitter,” my sister said on the way to the car, “How do you stand it?” She had a suitcase that she wheeled behind her and the sound echoed in the covered parking lot. “So, what’s the doctor say now?” she asked once we were settled in my car, a rusting 1993 Honda with a faulty heater and radio.
“Nothing much new,” I was straining to see if another car was approaching and deliberately avoided looking at her.
“Well, there must be something new.”
I saw then my mother as she had been that morning, when her attendant, a large black woman named Evandie, arranged her thin legs so that a pillow separated her knees, and then covered her with a blanket leaving her frail hands over its cuff. Her eyes had a milky appearance and she often slept with her mouth open, the sound of her breathing filling the room. “I’ve arranged a meeting for us tomorrow with her doctor,” I said as I maneuvered the car out of the parking lot.
Natalie’s hair was the colour of mink, with honey blonde streaks. She wore a camel hair coat and her suitcase was plaid with colours that matched her coat and trousers. Now in her early sixties, she looked affluent, with a beauty that had settled into grace. In many ways she was never more beautiful, the elegant wave of her hair swept off her neck and held in a French roll behind her head. And even though her face had changed over the years, the skin slackening about her jaw line, there was a serenity to her movements that was indeed beautiful; reminiscent it seemed to me, of a yacht gliding by in sunlight. Her perfume, a light, summery scent at odds with the frigid grey world we drove through, filled the tight space of my car.
The night before there had been a storm and snow lay in the fields on either side of the airport highway, dusting the road with white. As I drove through the desolate stretch leading to the main roadway, my sister said, “I’d forgotten it could feel like this,” rubbing her hands together for warmth. As we approached the city, the fields were replaced by apartment buildings and strip malls and I asked her about Samantha. “She’s fine, I suppose. She lives in San Francisco with her boyfriend, works for a publishing firm, but she doesn’t seem to have much time for her old mother.”
“What about Johnny, does she have time for him?”
“Ah, that’s right, you always had a soft spot for him, didn’t you,” she said. “You and Mom,” opening her purse and retrieving her sunglasses. “Well I don’t know if she does or not, because I never speak with Johnny.” We drove in silence for a few minutes until we stopped at a red light. “You haven’t asked me about Frankie.”
Frankie had been the CEO of a high tech company and had been fortunate—Natalie said intelligent—enough to get out before the bottom fell out the industry. She’d worked for him as an executive assistant when she was married to her third husband, a man I had never met, but who she said drank too much and made passes at all her friends. “It was a bad time in my life,” was how she summed up the years—five in total—when she had been with him.
“Why didn’t he come?” I asked, referring to Frankie. I had met him a few years before, when I stayed with them. He was gregarious, with a deep tan and a propensity to talk about golf, his own games and other matches he’d seen on the television. He had dark hair rimmed in grey at the temples, his laugh, which was frequent and often unexpected, was a loud bark, and he kept his hand on my sister’s elbow when they walked, as if steering her.
“He’s never met Mom, so what would be the point?”
It began to snow and I turned on the wipers. “It always was so pretty,” Natalie said. “I remember the first snowfall of the year, when I was kid, it was magical.” She straightened the purse on her lap and I knew there was something she wanted to say, “Look, I’ve been thinking, it might be better if I stay at a hotel.”
Since my divorce, I’d moved from the small town where I lived with my husband to Ottawa and a second floor apartment of an old Victorian building on a block of duplexes and old townhouses. Even though the street linked to one of the busiest in the city, it was also a place safe enough for cats to roam and where people played tennis in a park that I could see from my living room window. The old oak trees along the street were huge, the span of the branches covering the walkway of three or four townhouses; their gnarled, rough trunks emerged from the earth like powerful torsos. This was the image that came to mind as my sister spoke, those trees standing above the street, their proud and protective stance, as she continued to tell me how much easier it would be for both of us if she stayed at a hotel. She said she knew I’d always disapproved of her choices, that over the years I’d made that obvious. “So I think it would be a good idea to stay somewhere else, it just makes everything easier.”
“What are you thinking?” she said when I did not respond, and I realized she was interpreting my silence as contemplation. She turned slightly in her seat to look at me and when I glanced from the road to her face it looked soft, matted, like velvet. I wanted the comfort of her touch, or to lay my head on her lap as I had so often as a young child. I wanted to reach over to touch her face and feel the warmth of her cheek. “What?” she asked and when I didn’t answer, “What was that look for?”
“I haven’t told you this, haven’t told you much about my divorce at all, but he left because he had become unhappy.” I slowed and then stopped for a red light. “He said he fell in love, but I knew before that, he was unhappy. It was why he fell in love.” I had turned to look at her, at the way she watched me. “And well, I came to understand he had no choice. His leaving was almost organic, it was so intrinsic to who he is.”
“I’m sorry Amy, really. Marriages ending, it’s always sad.”
“Not sure why I’m telling you this, but I was thinking about where I live now, my apartment, how I like it and I guess it’s just, well, hurtful to think you won’t stay there with me,” I said and then looked back to the street which had widened to four lanes as it approached a major intersection. Cars careened around us, held in a tight pattern of movement and time, a complex and reckless order.
“Well, I guess I could stay,” Natalie said, searching through her purse for a tissue, which she used to wipe her nose. “It’ll be like old times.”
“What?” I said. “You can dress me up? While I stand on a chair and complain?” She laughed then, as we merged with the traffic and followed the lane to the Queensway, continuing the journey to our mother’s nursing home, and the next few weeks filled with heartache, and finally grief.
Us Dogs
In winter the world turns dark early, evening spreads through the yards as the sky turns deep navy, and then us dogs, with the tender light touching our coats, wander through the back shadows, shifting the tall grasses, our paws flattening the fallen leaves. On a day in mid-December I spent the afternoon with the boys and Peggy-Sue, four of us traipsing the trails and sniffing the cold ground, the grass, the tree bark, anything that could tell us what animal had passed by, where there had been a fire, a storm, a death, all the tales that told the past from that patch of land. The snow that year was late coming; the earth was hard though, waiting. The cold, salty smell of winter had settled in the brittle weeds, on the stones and rocks.
Purdy, a matted black Lab, bigger than I was with a soft wide nose, yelped. He was standing in front of a rubber boot in the high weeds beside the swamp.
Yapping, Cracker, a c
aramel-coloured mutt, part terrier with soft curly fur and a short tail, stretched his neck to sniff. He’d often snort inexplicably and had a nervous jumpiness, so that he would startle when I’d bark at him for entering my yard or chase him from his noisy flirtations.
Peggy-Sue circled from an adjacent clump of bushes where she had just caught a whiff of cat. Her fur was wiry and she had white markings on her face, chest and paws that stood out against the black of her hood and cape.
Purdy sniffed the boot again, as if he recognized it.
Barking, I looked down from the slope of a hill where I was watching them, their heads facing the boot, circling it. This discovery was the sort of thing they’d yap about for hours, after they each took a turn shaking it.
Peggy-Sue loved to hear her own voice barking; she’d bark at the water flowing, at a bird that flew too close, and once I saw her barking at storm clouds as they moved across the sky. When her bark irritated him, Purdy would often growl back, flicking his tail and walking away.
I would have joined them with the boot except at that moment I looked up to the sky and saw the day’s light had started to dim. It filled me with the urge to leave, to make my way home to the back porch, through the fields tinged with night, and wait for the boy, for my dinner, for the day to complete its change from day to night. While I sat on the veranda, no animal, dog or human, crossed the alley behind my house without my bark telling them what I thought of their trespassing. My mouth was perfectly suited for this purpose; it was wide, set in a smile, and I could get a good bark behind it. I enjoyed barking; I enjoyed the eddy of sound it made around me, the way it stopped other animals and made them pay attention, show respect.
When I saw Cracker, who I’d left with the boot, trampling the weeds and high grass in that mindless nonchalance I knew so well, I growled at him and he yelped back. With the commotion, the woman from my house came to the door. “Duke,” she called, “Come here boy”.
The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 7