Bitter Sweet (55 page)

Ma repeated a question then yelped, ‘Boy, you got rutabagas in your ears or somethin’!’

‘Oh... what?”

‘I asked you if you wanted something else- some oatmeal maybe or some lunch meat on toast?’

‘No, nothing, Ma. I’m not hungry.’

‘Not revving on all cylinders this morning either, are you?’

‘Sorry. Listen, if you don’t need me for anything I’ve got to run back to Fish Creek.’

‘Naw. Go ahead. This rain looks like she’s settled in for good.’

He hadn’t told either of them why he’d decided to move back home with Nancy, and though Mike calmly leaned against the sink, sipping coffee, watching Eric appraisingly, Eric chose not to enlighten him yet. Besides, Ma knew nothing about Maggie’s pregnancy and he couldn’t bear telling her yet. Maybe he never would. Guilt again: withholding the truth from Ma, who always found out everything, as if she had hidden antennae that twitched whenever her boys were bad.

When he was eight- he remembered the age clearly, because Miss Wystad had been his teacher that year, and it was the year Eric had been experimenting with his first cussing - he had laughed and poked fun at a boy named Eugene Behrens who had come to school with a hole in the seat of his overalls and bare skin showing through.
Eugene
also had a home-style bowl-and-scissors haircut that made him look like one of the Three Stooges.

Bare-ass Behrens, Eric had called him.

‘Hey, Yoo-gene,’ Eric had hollered across the playground.

‘Hey Yoo-gene Bare-ass Behrens, where’s your underwear, Yoo.-gene?’

While
Eugene
turned away stoically, Eric had taunted in a sing-song, Yoo-gene Behren’s ass is bare He ain’t got no underwear Looks like a stooge in his bowl of hair! While
Eugene
broke into a run, crying, Eric turned around to find Miss Wystad five feet behind him.

“Eric, I think you and I had better go inside,’ she’d said sternly.

Of that conversation Eric remembered little, except his question, ‘You gonna tell my Ma?’

Miss Wystad hadn’t told Ma, but she’d meted out a strapping that stung yet, as he remembered it, and had made him stand before the class and apologize to
Eugene
aloud while he was still red-faced and hurting and humiliated.

How Ma ever found out about the fiasco Eric never knew - Mike swore he hadn’t told her.

But find out she did (though she never alluded to the incident) and her punishment was even more ignominious than Miss Wystad’s.

He’d come home one day after school to find her cleaning out his chest of drawers. She had culled out some of his underwear, socks, T-shirts, corduroys. As he stood watching, she added to the stack a new T-shirt, his favourite, across its front a picture of Superman in flight. As she stacked the clothes, she spoke offhandedly. ‘There’s a family named Behrens - real poor, got ten kids. One of ‘em’s in your room, I think. A
Eugene
? Anyway, their Pa got killed in an accident at the shipyards a couple of years ago, and their Ma’s got quite a struggle to raise “em. My church circle’s taking up a collection of used clothing to help them out, and I want you to take these to school tomorrow and give them to that boy, Eugene. Will you do that for me, Eric?” for the first time she glanced flat at him.

He’d dropped his eyes to his Superman shirt and gulped down a protest.

‘You’ll do that, won’t you, son?’

For the rest of that school year he’d watched Eugene Behrens come to school in his Superman shirt. He’d never again poked fun at anyone less fortunate than he. And he’d never again tried to withhold his misdeeds from Ma. If he got into a scrape, he’d march straight home and confess, ‘Ma, I got into trouble today.’ And they’d sit down and work it out.

Driving to Maggie’s through the downpour on a black summer day, he wished for the simplicity of those problems again, wished that he could simply go to his mother and say, ‘Ma, I’m in trouble,’ and they could sit down and work it out as they’d always been able.

The recollection made him blue, and he forgave Eugene Behrens for wearing his Superman shirt, and wondered where
Eugene
was now and hoped he had a closet full of nice clothes and enough money to live in luxury.

At Maggie’s the lights were on: yellow patches upon a purple day. hipped by the strong wind, the arborvitaes swayed and danced. The wet yellow paint on the house had darkened to ochre. The daylilies beside the back stoop were beaten flat by the water sheeting from the roof. As he ran down the steps droplets plopped from the maples in great, cold blobs that struck his neck and head and shattered on his blue windbreaker. The rag rug on the back verandah squished as he leapt onto it. Inside, the kitchen was empty but bright.

To Eric’s dismay, his knock was answered by Katy, wearing a curious expression that soured into censure the moment she saw who stood outside.

‘Hello, Katy.’

‘Hello,’ she replied tightly.

‘Is your mother here?’

‘Follow me,” she ordered and went away. He hurriedly removed his tennis shoes and watched her disappear along the short passage into the dining room from where voices could be heard. He hung his head, shook the water from his hair and followed to find Katy waiting just inside the dining room doorway, the table surrounded by guests, and Maggie, at the foot.

‘Someone to see you, Mother.’

The conversation ceased and every pair of eyes in the room settled on him.

Caught by surprise, Maggie stared at Eric as if he were an apparition. Her face turned brilliant crimson before she finally gathered her poise and rose.

‘Well, Eric, this is a surprise. Won’t you join us? Katy, get him a cup, will you?’ She moved over to make room for him beside her while Katy got a cup from the built-in hutch and belligerently clattered it onto the place mat. Maggie tried to rescue the moment by performing introductions. ‘This is a friend of mine, Eric Severson, and these are my guests...’

She named three couples but in her embarrassment forgot the names of the fourth and coloured again, stammering an apology. ‘Eric runs a charter boat out of Gills Rock,’ she informed them.

They passed him the footed china coffee urn, and the plate of pumpkin muffins, and the butter, and a glass of pineapple juice which one of them poured at the far end of the table as if this were one big happy family.

He should have called first. Should have considered that she’d be with her guests over breakfast, and that Katy would be here and openly antagonistic. Instead, he found himself subjected to thirty minutes of chit-chat with Maggie tense as a guy-wire on his right, and Katy bristling with animosity on his left, and an audience of eight attempting to pretend they noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

When the ordeal ended, he had to wait while Maggie accepted cheques from two of her clients, answered several questions and quietly gave orders to her daughter to clean up the dining room and go on with her daily work. “I won’t be long,’ she ended, finding a long grey sweater and tossing it over her shoulders as she hurried with Eric through the rain toward the truck.

When the doors slammed, they sat in their soggy clothes, breathing hard, staring straight ahead. Finally Eric blew out a great breath. His shoulders wilted.

‘Maggie, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here at this time of day.’

‘No, you shouldn’t have.’

“I never thought about you being at breakfast.’

‘I run a bed and breakfast, remember? Breakfast happens every morning here.’

‘Katy wanted to slam the door in my face.’

‘Katy’s been taught some manners, and she knows she’d better remember them. What’s wrong?’

‘Can you come for a ride? Someplace away from here? Just out in the country a ways? We need to talk.’

She laughed tensely. ‘Obviously.’ Rarely had he seen her upset, but she was - with him - as she glanced toward the house where Katy’s image could be seen moving about the kitchen beyond the lace curtains. ‘No, I shouldn’t leave, I have work to do, and there’s no sense getting Katy any more antagonistic than she already is.’

‘Please, Maggie. I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important.’

‘I realize that. That’s why I came outside with you. But I can’t leave. I only have a minute.’

A man came out, the guest whose name Maggie had forgotten, carrying two suitcases, running through the downpour to his car across the road.

‘Please, Maggie.’

She expelled a breath of exasperation. ‘All right, but not for long.’

The engine sputtered, caught, and blustered as he pumped the gas, then put the truck in gear and drove up the switchback with the tyres hissing like brushes on a drum, and the windshield wipers thumping like a metronome. He drove the opposite direction of town, south onto Highway 4a, then east on EE until he came to a narrow gravel track leading off into a copse of scrubwoods. At the end of the trail where the trees gave onto a fallow field, he pulled to a halt and cut the engine. Around them the heavens dripped, clouds glowered, and the heads of wildflowers drooped like penitents before a confessor.

They sat momentarily, each enveloped by his own thoughts, adjusting to the metallic resonance of rain on the cab, the absence of flapping wipers, the blurred landscape whose focal point was an abandoned farmstead viewed through ribbons of rainwater branching down the windshield.

In unison they turned their heads to look at one another.

‘Maggie,’ he said, forlornly.

‘It’s something bad, isn’t it?’

‘Come here,’ he whispered hoarsely, catching and holding her with his cheek and nose against the pleasant mustiness of her wet hair and wool sweater. ‘Yes. It’s bad.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s worse than the worst you’ve ever imagined.’

‘Tell me.’

He drew back, met her brown eyes with an earnest, apologetic gaze. ‘
Nancy
is pregnant.’

Shock. Disbelief. Denial. ‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered, pulling away, covering her lips, staring out the windshield.

Quieter still, ‘Oh, my God.’

Her eyes closed and he watched her battle with it, pressing her fingertips harder and harder against her lips until he thought her teeth must be cutting them. In time her eyes opened, and blinked once in slow motion, like an antique doll with lead-weights in its head.

‘Maggie... oh, Maggie-honey, I’m sorry.’

She heard only a roar in her ears.

She had been a fool. She had played into the hands of a man who was typical, after all. She had not questioned or demanded, but had taken him at his word that he loved her and was seeking a divorce. Her mother had warned her. Her daughter had warned her. But she’d been so sure of him, so absolute in her trust.

Now he was leaving her for his wife, leaving her nearly five months pregnant with his child.

She did not cry; one cannot weep ice crystals.

‘Take me home, please,’ she said, sitting straight as a surveyor’s rod, donning a veneer of dignity.

‘Maggie, please don’t do this, don’t turn away.’

‘You’ve made your decision. It’s clear. Take me home.’

‘I’ve badgered her for all these years. How can I divorce her now?’

‘No, of course you can’t. Take me home, please.’

“Not until you -’

‘Goddamn you!’ She swung, slapped his cheek hard.

‘Don’t you issue ultimatums to me. You have no more rights over me, no more say over what I choose to do!

None! Start the engine this instant or I’ll get out and walk!’

‘It’s a mistake, Maggie. I didn’t want her to get pregnant.

It happened before you and I even knew what we wanted, when I was so mixed up and trying to decide what to do about my marriage.’

She flung open the truck door and stepped into soggy grass. Cold water oozed into the lacing holes of her shoes.

She ignored it and headed along the dirt track knocking aside a clump of tall milkweed which wet her slacks to mid-thigh.

His truck door slammed and he grabbed her arm. ‘Get back in the truck,’ he ordered.

She pulled free and stalked on, head high, eyes dry of all but rainwater which plastered her hair to her forehead and leached through her eyelashes.

‘Maggie, I’m a damn fool but your baby is mine and I want to be its father!’ he cared.

‘Tough!’ she called. ‘Go back to your wife!’

‘Maggie, goddamn it, will you stop!’

She marched on. He cursed again, then the truck door slammed and the engine started. Killed. Started again, roared like a hungry giant before the truck shot backward, spraying wet muck onto its underbelly. She trooped along the worn track, as dogged as a foot soldier, preventing his bypassing her.

Bumping along behind her, in reverse, he hung his head out the window.

‘Maggie, get in the damn truck!’

She gave him the flying finger, marching headlong toward the road.

He changed his tack, tried cajoling. ‘Come on, Maggie.’

‘You’re out of my life, Severson!” she yelled, almost joyously. When she reached the blacktop he squealed backward onto the pavement on two tyres and changed directions with a grinding shift that dropped the truck’s guts.