Bitter Sweet (29 page)

‘Hi, Grandpa.’

‘Well, little Katy.’ He came from the kitchen and gave her a bear hug. ‘Imagine you being old enough to drive up here dear from
Chicago
. How’s school?’

They chatted as they ambled back toward the kitchen.

Vera asked if Katy had had supper, and when she said no, opened the refrigerator door. ‘Well, I have some leftover soup I’ll warm up for you.
Roy
, move your junk aside.

You’ve got it strewn all over the table.’ She began warming soup while Katy and Roy sat at the table and he asked her about Chicago and school.

When she had first made plans to go away to college, this was the scene she had imagined happening with her mother when she returned home. If she’d gone to her mother’s first, it would be happening there. But that strange house in this strange little town! How could her mother have done this to her? How? Her mother accused her, Katy, of being selfish when Katy viewed Maggie’s move as a rash act of selfishness.

Vera came with the soup, crackers, cheese and lunch meat and joined them while Katy ate. Afterwards she began cleaning up the kitchen and
Roy
drew his work back to the centre of the table.

‘What are you making, Grandpa?’

‘A whole Victorian town. I make a couple of buildings each year. The first year I did the church, and I’ve done nine since then.’

‘What are you doing this year?’

‘A house. A model of your mother’s actually.’ Watching him piece together two delicate pieces of wood she became filled with a mixture of longings she did not understand. To be with her mother; to be free of her. To see the house; never to see it. To love it; to despise it. ‘She’s bought herself quite a beautiful place, you know.’

Vera spoke up from the sink. ‘I told her she was crazy to buy a place that big. And that old, for heaven’s sake, but she wouldn’t listen to me. What a single woman wants with a house that size is beyond me...’

Vera went on and on. Katy stared at the replica and tried to understand her complex emotions.
Roy
spread glue on a miniature window-frame and applied it to the house. What would the finished house look like? The upper half, the roof?

‘... hasn’t got a stick of furniture in the place, so I don’t know where you’re going to sleep if you do go over there,’

Vera finally ended.

The scent of the glue filled the room. At the sink, Vera shined the faucets. Without glancing up from his work,
Roy
told his granddaughter, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if your mother is waiting for you right now to show it to you.’

Katy’s eyes began stinging. The tears blurred
Roy
’s hands as she watched him spread glue along another piece and hold it in place. She thought of
Seattle
and the house she knew so well. She thought of a house across town where not a single memory dwelled. She must go to this place she resented, to this mother with whom she’d fought, whom she missed so hard it hurt her chest.

She waited until Vera went upstairs to the bathroom.

In the quiet kitchen
Roy
continued piecing his model.

‘Grandpa?’ Katy said quietly.

‘Hm?’ he replied, giving the impression his only concern was completing another building for his Victorian town.

‘I need some directions to find it.’

He looked up, smiled like a tired Santa Claus and reached across the table to give her hand a squeeze. ‘Good girl,’ he said.

The road was steep and curved. She remembered it vaguely from years ago when they’d occasionally come here for a summer vacation and would drive up the hill to look at the summer homes of the ‘rich people’. The cliff, on the left, and the overhanging trees on the right hemmed in the road itself, streetlights lit it, only an occasional light from a back porch, and in places even these were held back by walls of thick evergreens. The car lights picked out stone walls, frosted with snow, and the steep gabled roofs of garages that appeared to have more character than many modem homes.

She spotted her mother’s car easily and pulled up across from it beside a tall wall of evergreens. Shifting to neutral, she stared at the vehicle with its cap of snow, at the strange garage, the flat white surface of the tennis court and the dilapidated arbour seat about which her mother’s letters had been filled.

She felt strangely remote, confronting these things that already meant something to her mother. Again came the sense of abandonment for she, Katy, was no part of anything around her.

A glance to the right revealed the thick hedge that cut off her view of the house. Reluctantly, Katy switched off the lights, killed the engine and left the car.

She stood for moments at the top of the walk between the pungent shrubs, looking down on the backside of a house where the light on a small rear verandah beamed a welcome.

There was a door with a window, and beside it another window, long and skinny, throwing a slash of gold across the snow. She glanced up at the looming roofline, but made out only great bulk with no detail visible in the shadows.

At last she started down the steps.

On the verandah she paused, her hands pushed deep into her pockets, staring at the lace on the window and the unclear images beyond. She felt as if her own needs, like the image seen through the coarse lace, had become obscure.

She did not need her mother, yet her absence hurt. She did not need to come here for the holiday, yet going to
Seattle
without family was unthinkable. She glanced at the Indian corn and the brass plaque, prepared to dislike the place, cataloguing instead its welcoming charm.

She rapped on the door and stood back, waiting. Her heart hammered with both expectation and trepidation as she saw, through the lace, a figure move deep in the room.

The door opened and there stood Maggie, smiling, wearing a pair of modish grey acid-washed bib overalls and a shirt styled like pink underwear.

‘Katy, you’re here.’

‘Hello, Mother,’ Katy replied coolly.

‘Well, come inside.’ Embracing Katy, who more or less allowed it, Maggie thought, Oh, Katy, don’t be like Mother.

Please don’t turn out like her. Released, Katy stood with her hands in her pockets, behind a barrier as palpable as a steel wall, leaving Maggie to search for enough social graces for two.

‘So, how was your ride up?’

‘Fine.’

‘I expected you much earlier.’

‘I stopped at Grandma and Grandpa’s. I had supper with them.’

‘Oh.’ Maggie carefully concealed her disappointment.

She had prepared spaghetti and meatballs, cheese bread and apple crisp-all Katy’s favourites. ‘Well, I’m sure they loved that. They’ve really been looking forward to your coming.’

Pulling her wool scarf from around her neck, Katy glanced at the kitchen. ‘So this is the house.” A room with warmth and hospitality but so different from the house in which she’d grown up. Where was their old kitchen table?

Where had this new one come from? And when had her mother begun dressing like a coed? So many changes. They gave Katy the impression she’d been away for years instead of weeks, that her mother had been perfectly happy without her.

‘Yes, this is it. This was the first room I had redone.

That’s an old table of Grandpa’s, the cabinets are new, but the floor is original. Would you like to see the rest of it?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Well, here ... take your jacket off and we’ll walk through.’

As they moved through the. empty rooms Katy asked, ‘Where’s all our furniture?’

‘Stored in the garage. When it arrived I hadn’t had the floors refinished yet.’

It became apparent, as Katy was led through the house, that her mother had no intention of unearthing the relics of their past, that she would furnish the entire house with strange pieces. Katy’s resentment prickled once again, although even she was forced to admit their traditional furniture would look puny and out of place in this house with its ten-foot ceilings and generous rooms. The structure demanded pieces with bulk and character and a long history.

They reached the Belvedere Room, and there at last was the familiarity for which Katy so longed: her own bed and dresser, looking ridiculously dwarfed in the immense space.

The bed was covered with her familiar blue daisy spread, looking faded and ill chosen, and Maggie had unearthed several giant stuffed toys to set beside it. On the dresser were a jewellery box Katy had received as a Christmas gift when she was nine and a basket holding the mementoes of recent years: beads and perfume bottles and the pom-poms from her roller skates.

She stared at it, feeling a lump form in her throat. How childish everything suddenly looked.

Behind her Maggie spoke quietly. ‘I wasn’t sure what you’d like put out.’

The blue daisies grew wavery and the awful weight of change pressed upon Katy. She felt her throat constrict. She wanted to be twelve again, and have Daddy alive, and not have to grow accustomed to changes. Simultaneously she liked being a college freshman, taking her first step in the world and being free of parental constraints. Abruptly she spun and threw herself into Maggie’s arms.

‘Oh, Mother, it’s s... so hard gr... growing up.’

Maggie’s heart swelled with love and understanding. ‘I know, darling, I know. For me, too.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So am I.’

‘But I miss the old house and
Seattle
so m... much.’

‘I know you do.’ Maggie rubbed Katy’s back. ‘But it, and all the memories associated with it are part of the past. I had to leave them and make room for something new in my life, otherwise I would have withered away, don’t you understand?’

‘I do, really I do.’

‘Leaving there doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten your father, or what he meant to both of us. I loved him, Katy, and we had the best life I could imagine, the kind I’d wish for you and your own husband someday. But I discovered that when he died, I’d died, too, for all practical purposes. I sealed myself away and mourned him and stopped caring about things it’s not healthy to stop caring about. Since I’ve been here, I’ve felt so... so alive again! I have purpose, don’t you see? I have the house to work on, and spring to look forward to, and a business to get on its feet.’

Katy saw it all, this new side of her mother, a woman of tremendous resilience who could hy aside the straits of widowhood and bloom anew, immersed in fresh interests. A woman of eclectic tastes who could store away a houseful of traditional furniture and, eager-eyed, thrust herself into the gathering of antiques. A businesswoman who greeted new challenges with surprising confidence. A mother who was facing a catharsis as consequential as that which Katy herself was feeling. Accepting this new side of Maggie meant saying good-bye to the old one, but Katy realized she must do so.

She pulled back, still sniffling. ‘I love the house, Mom. I didn’t want to, but I can’t help it.’

Maggie smiled. ‘You didn’t want to?’

Mopping her eyes, Katy complained, ‘Well, damn it, I hate antiques! I’ve always hated antiques! And you start writing to me about armoires and brass beds and I start getting curious, and now here I am, picturing them and getting excited!’

Laughing, Maggie drew Katy into her arms again and the two rocked from side to side. ‘That’s called growth, dear - learning to accept new things.’

Katy puffed back. ‘And what is this called...’ She plucked at Maggie’s shirt sleeve. ‘... my forty-year-old mother dressed like a teeny-bopper. Is this growth, too?’

Maggie buried her hands in her deep overalls pockets, rolled back on her heels and looked down at her clothes.

‘You like them?’

‘No. Ye.’ Katy threw her hands in the air. ‘Cripes, I don’t know! You don’t look like Mom anymore. You look like one of the girls in the dorm! It’s scary.’

‘Just because I’m a mother doesn’t mean I have to dress like Harriet Nelson, does it?’

‘Who’s Harriet Nelson?’

‘Ozzie’s Harriet, and by the way, I like being forty.’ ‘Oh, Mom . . .’ Katy smiled and hooked Maggie’s arm with her own, turning her toward the stairs. I’m happy for you, really I am. I doubt that this will ever feel like home to me, but if you’re happy, I guess I should be glad for you.’

Later, when they were getting Katy settled in the Belvedere Room, she observed, ‘Grandma’s not too happy about your buying this place, is she?’

‘What has Grandma ever been happy about?’

‘Not much that I can remember. How did you end up so different from her?’

‘With a conscious effort,’ Maggie replied. ‘Sometimes I pity her, but other times she absolutely infuriates me. Since I’ve moved out of her house and into this one I’ve only gone over there once a week, that’s the only way we can get along.’

‘Grandpa is sweet though.’

‘Yes, he is, and I regret that I don’t see him more. But he stops over here quite often. He loves the house, too.’

‘What about Grandma?’

‘She hasn’t seen it yet.’