View From a Kite (6 page)

“Aren't Robert and Emma coming tonight?”

“Next weekend.” Lies fall off my tongue so easily, now. I ask her about her garden and listen to her complain about George, who was supposed to have tilled it three weeks ago and keeps putting it off—rain or a bad back or some such weak excuse. When we finish I clear the table and bring her tea. She sips, spooning sugar onto the table while I do the dishes. Something's going to have to be done about Edith. She's getting worse, any day she could do something dramatic, something wildly dangerous. I try to think back to her behaviour before I went to the hospital, but I'd been so tired and sick before I left, I can't remember very clearly. She was odd, and forgetful, but she's always seemed like that to me. There is fire to worry about. Suppose she leaves something burning? What if she wanders off? George and Elizabeth keep a close eye on her, but, but, but. If we send her to a home, she'll die. I'm quite sure without her kitchen and all those granny squares she'll dry up and crumble like last year's maple leaves. Maybe I could hire someone to stay with her. Who? How would we pay? I haven't the faintest idea what Edith does for money.

My head begins to ache, and my chest hurts. A stream of ants are shifting the sugar to a storeroom behind the base
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boards. I smack them off the table, scoop sugar into the sink and sweep thrashing ants and grains of floor sugar into a dust
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pan and toss everything out the back door. Go out and retrieve the dustpan. Fish a cigarette from my pocket and smoke it on the back step. The frogs are hysterical in the ditches. Hot-to-trot is what they mean, but it sounds like creep-creep-creep.

The phone rings, and I hear Aunt Edith talking.

“Elizabeth wants to talk to you.” She sticks her head out the door and gestures back towards the phone.

“Tell her I'm on my way over to visit,” I say. “Want to come with me?”

“Oh no, dear. Thank you.” Her head disappears and I get up and start walking down the drive. It will take me seven minutes to get to Elizabeth's kitchen and Edith will still be on the phone when I get there. She and Elizabeth talk on the phone twice a day, every day. They can look out their windows and see the lights in each other's houses. They go to church together; they go shopping together; they hang their laundry out at the same time on Monday mornings. Their phone calls are a kind of mutual breathing.

“Hi, Gwen honey. Come on in and set down. You look good, sweetheart. How're you feeling?”

“Pretty good, now that I'm home.”

“You walked all the way over here? Honey, are you supposed to do that?”

“They let her out,” says George, “so she can't be at death's door. That, or she was too hot to handle and they had to turn her loose.” He gives me a wink.

“I walked slow, and all that fresh air's good for me.”

Elizabeth pours me a cup of tea and passes a plate of cookies. “It's not my baking day or I'd have something decent to offer you.” Decent meaning three kinds of squares and two kinds of pie.

“These are great.” Macaroons, chocolate, crisp on the outside, oozy rich on the inside. “How's Aunt Edith been?”

“About the same. We keep a pretty close watch.”

I know they do. I console myself with that when I'm fretting in my stupid, unromantic hospital bed. George goes over every morning and has a cup of tea with her. Also, he fills her woodbox, empties and re-sets her mousetraps, takes out her garbage, makes sure she hasn't fallen during the night. And Elizabeth makes her twice-daily calls. After her lights go out across the field George takes Spanner for a last walk and on his way back checks on the house. He has to sneak up to her pantry window to check the burners on the propane stove, and around to the side kitchen window to see if the dampers are in the proper position on the Enterprise. He makes sure the door is locked. He uses a flashlight, after she's asleep, so she won't be embarrassed by his checking up or frightened that he's a burglar.

“She's good with the stoves, but I always check.”

“How long can she go on?” Part of me is terrified Edith will come to harm. Part of me is self-centredly terrified I'll lose the last thing remotely resembling home.

“As long as God wills it,” says Elizabeth.

Great. In other words, it's a crap shoot.

“Hey, Spanner.” I let him lick the cookie crumbs off my fingers, then feed him a whole macaroon when no one's watching. I love this dog. When we were both a lot younger he would let me nap with my head on his belly and keep me company anywhere I wanted to go. His muzzle's gone white and he's getting deaf and blind. Still thinks he can hunt, though, still thinks he's one hot old boy.

“His hind legs is giving him trouble now and again,” says George, “but he's in pretty good shape for an old fella. Like me, good to the last drop.”

He gives me another wink. I think George is one of those old guys who corners his wife in the pantry in the middle of the day for a little kitchen-counter fun. Elizabeth is a giggler and a blusher, though never out in the real world, just in her own kitchen. It's not as weird as it sounds. It makes you feel a little sappy, like you're part of some Disney kiddie movie, except you know George and Elizabeth aren't trying to manipulate your emotions for the price of admission. They just can't help themselves. When I was a kid I used to pretend they were my grandparents and that Spanner was really my dog, the one I couldn't keep in town, that had to be kept out on my grandparents' farm. Spanner thinks he is George's dog, and that I am his kid. And supplier of illicit cookies.

CHAPTER 10

It's a beautiful sunny morning. Aunt Edith is making me buttermilk pancakes slathered with her homemade blueberry preserves, and if that pales, I can drown them in the maple syrup George makes every March from the sugar bush out behind his house. There's freshly ground coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice. Real food, that's two meals in a row. How will I ever choke anything down when I get back to the San? You look so thin, says Edith. You've lost so much weight, says Elizabeth. Put a little butter on that, says George, of everything I bring to my mouth, chocolate macaroons included.

I must admit that when I first started losing weight I was pleased. I dropped from a pudgy hundred and twenty-five down to one-eighteen in a month, and kept on going, down, down. My clothes hung off me, there were elegant bones everywhere. One hundred and five, and my breasts disappeared. They hadn't been that big to begin with, but they were mine and I was fond of them. By the time they hauled me off to the San, a feverish, weepy, ninety-pound weakling, I was out of love with elegant bones and scared that I was coming out through my skin. They weigh you there every Saturday morning, roll a big scale up and down the ward, weighing you and marking your fate on a chart. If you've lost weight, you lose privileges. You have to go back to bedrest for the next week, and certainly you will not be issued a weekend pass to go home. As the scale rumbles closer and closer to my room, I suck in extra air and try to think fat. The first month I kept losing. I didn't stir out of bed the whole time, but I lost three more pounds. Then for two weeks—nothing—while I choked down vile, inedible mush and hoped it would stick somewhere inside. Finally, a sudden two-pound gain. They let me up for an hour a day. The exercise, I told them, makes me hungry. Now I'm a porky one hundred and one pounds, fat enough not to blow away in the outside world. I scarf down pancakes until an explosion is imminent. If you've gained weight during a weekend home, they put it down on your chart with a green asterisk and the next month Dr. Robichaud is much more inclined to let you out again.

After breakfast, I lie on the porch swing while Edith does up the dishes.

“Let me do those,” I'd said, but she'd chased me away with the dishtowel. “Get out in the sun,” she'd said, so here I am, sorting through the pile of junk mail that has arrived for me in the past month. A record club is threatening to take my firstborn. Another one wants to give me five thousand free tapes for one dollar each plus shipping and handling. The spring Eaton's catalogue is about to expire, still in its plastic bag. It seems pink and lime green are in. If I had to pick a season to live in pyjamas, this was a good one.

Aunt Edith brings me out the ubiquitous cup of tea, and bundles me up in a purple, green, royal blue, and mauve afghan. I match the lilacs.

“What's this?” I wave a business card that has fallen out of the paper pile. Edith looks perplexed, reads the card, turns it over.

“A man,” she says. “A salesman. He's gone.”

It doesn't look like the business card of a salesman. He's some kind of rep for a magazine Susan and Clara and I used to read at the check-out counter and make fun of:

ALIEN BABY EATS PARENTS

SIX-YEAR-OLD BOY GIVES BIRTH TO GRANDMOTHER

107-YEAR-OLD MAN MARRIES 20-YEAR-OLD BRIDE; TRUE
LOVE AT LAST

“What did he want?” I ask her.

Her face clouds, brightens, clouds. She surfaces somewhere a few decades back. Time is a river to Aunt Edith, and she is a fish. She rises and falls with invisible currents.

“He wanted to speak to Robert. I told him Robert was away in town.”

“Are you sure that's what he said?”

“He had the wrong house. He wanted to speak to my niece. I told him my niece was a baby.” She stares at me, confused. Rises higher in the river, recognizes me, and blinks.

“Do you want some tea, dear?'

“No thanks, Aunt Edith,” I say, and she goes indoors. I pick the card up from where she has dropped it. Melvin Holyoke is his name. I put him in the discard pile.

At ten o'clock, Elizabeth drives up to collect Edith. She is taking her to the dentist.

“Don't you move from this porch,” she says. “We'll be back in time for lunch, and we're bringing you a big pizza from Nick's.” She beams; she re-tucks my afghan.

“I promise,” I say, and wave them off. I've every intention of staying right where I am, but half an hour later there's all that tea and coffee and orange juice to unload. When I come back downstairs there's a man standing in the back porch.

“Good morning.” He smiles, confidingly, as if we've been up to something together. “The door was open, I hope you don't mind. Melvin Holyoke's the name, I left my card with your aunt, Miss…MacIntyre? Gwen, is it?”

By now he's oozed into the kitchen, he has put his hat down on the table and pulled himself out a chair.

“Mind if I take a seat?” He hands me a second card. He lowers his backside onto the crocheted cushion that eases Edith's bad hip when she sits down to eat, and pulls up the knees of his polyester-blend pants so they won't stretch out of shape over his bent knees. I stand with my back to the wood stove, pick up a cup of lukewarm tea (Edith's, I think) from a trivet and sip from it to steady my hand.

“We would like to do an exclusive interview with you—with pictures, of course—to tell your story. We are prepared to offer you a considerable sum of money, to help with your future education costs, and so on. Perhaps,” he looks around at the faded wallpaper (teapots and kettles full of daisies) and the chipped green woodwork, “you might like to finance a few renovations for your aunt? Or take her on a trip to Florida next winter? My own dear mother minds the cold dreadfully; she loves to get away to play a little golf in February.”

I smile at the image of Edith whacking a ball on a green in Florida.

He smiles back, a vast expanse of capped teeth.

I want to kill him.

“My story…” My lips are dry and I stop to lick them. “As in, Tragic Tubercular Teenager Locked Up In Sanatorium After Father Blows Hole In Mother's Brain? Something like that?”

“I can assure you we will tell your story with the utmost delicacy and sensitivity.” He's so eager the badly trimmed hairs in his nose are quivering. “We think you should have some recompense for your pain, and a chance to talk—to share your burden.”

“How much money?” I ask. I am calm. Composed. My mother's manners are a smooth surface over black rage.

He doesn't blink. “I should think in the neighbourhood of twenty thousand dollars.”

“That's all?” I ask, sloshing tea on my knuckles. Calm and composed is beginning to crack.

“Well, that's just an opening offer, of course. We may be able to go a bit higher, but we'll need pictures of you and your parents.”

“Bastard,” I mutter.

“Excuse me?” he says.

I fling the cup and the rest of the tea in his face.

“Bastard!” I yell it, so he can't mistake me. I throw the pot at him, the potholder, the trivet, and the wet dish towels hanging from the line above the stove.

I scream, “Bastard! Bastard!” I can't think of another word, but this one seems to sum up everything I have to say. I want more things to throw at him.

He's on his hands and knees in the porch, scrabbling at the door handle. I dump the coal scuttle and the coal on his head as he dives down the back steps. He's bleeding a bit, which rouses me to further effort.

“Bastard, bastard, bastard!” I howl, and throw wood from the woodbox and an armload of boots and shoes. He's running for his car and finally manages to get inside and lock the door. Not before I get him with a nice chunk of birch. I pitch the two pots of pink geraniums on the bottom step at him and take out a headlamp before he gets the car into gear.

Then there's nothing big left to throw, so I heave fistfuls of gravel from the drive, trying to scratch and chip the paint on his car as he fishtails down the lane and out onto the highway.

I have a brief screaming fit. Maybe it's brief, I don't remember. At some point I stop, burnt out and exhausted. I hate losing control like this. My throat hurts, my lungs hurt, my head hurts, but it's better than crying. Anything's better than useless, stupid crying. I wipe my nose on my bathrobe sleeve, retie my belt, and stumble back to the house. When I get to the kitchen I lift the stove lid and drop his hat into the firebox. I clean up and make a fresh pot of tea in the freshly chipped teapot, then I curl up on the porch swing and tuck myself back into Edith's afghan. I sip tea and pretend I am vacationing in Majorca before heading off on my next book tour.