Selected Stories (44 page)

“Oh, all right, if there’s all that much prejudice against panty hose,” says Valerie behind her window. “I won’t even put on a dress. I’ll come as I am.”

“Not that!” cries George, and staggers, holding the lawn chairs up in front of his face.

But Valerie, appearing in the doorway, is dressed beautifully, in a loose gown of green and gold and blue. She doesn’t have to worry about George’s opinion of long dresses. She is absolved of blame anyway, because you could never say that Valerie is looking to be courted or admired. She is a tall, flat-chested woman, whose long, plain face seems to be crackling with welcome, eager understanding, with humor and intelligence and appreciation. Her hair is thick, gray-black, and curly. This summer she recklessly cut it off, so that all that is left is a curly crew cut, revealing her long, corded neck and the creases at the edge of her cheeks, and her large, flat ears.

“I think it makes me look like a goat,” she has said. “I like goats. I love their eyes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have those horizontal pupils. Bizarre!”

Her children tell her she is bizarre enough already.

Here come Valerie’s children now, as George and Roberta and Angela and Eva crowd into the hall, Roberta saying that she is dripping ice and must get this pretentious concoction into the freezer. First, Ruth, who is twenty-five and nearly six feet tall and looks a lot like her mother. She has given up wanting to be an actress and is learning to teach disturbed children. Her arms are full of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace and dahlias—weeds and flowers all mixed up together—and she throws them on the hall floor with a theatrical gesture and embraces the bombe.

“Dessert,” she says lovingly. “Oh, bliss! Angela, you look incredibly lovely! Eva too. I know who Eva is. She’s the Bride of Lammermoor!”

Angela will allow, even delight in, such open praise from Ruth, because Ruth is the person she admires most in the world—possibly the only person she admires.

“The Bride of who?” Eva is asking happily. “The Bride of who?”

David, Valerie’s twenty-one-year-old son, a history student, is standing in the living-room doorway, smiling tolerantly and affectionately at the excitement. David is tall and lean, dark-haired and dark-skinned, like his mother and sister, but he is deliberate, low-voiced, never rash. In this household of many delicate checks and balances it is noticeable that the lively, outspoken women defer to David in some ceremonial way, seeming to ask for the gesture of his
protection, though protection itself is something they are not likely to need.

When the greetings die down David says, “This is Kimberly,” and introduces them each in turn to the young woman standing under his arm. She is very clean and trim, in a white skirt and a short-sleeved pink shirt. She wears glasses and no makeup; her hair is short and straight and tidy, and a pleasant light-brown color. She shakes hands with each of them and looks each of them in the eye, through her glasses, and though her manner is entirely polite, even subdued, there is a slight feeling of an official person greeting the members of an unruly, outlandish delegation.

Valerie has known both George and Roberta for years. She knew them long before they knew each other. She and George were on the staff of the same Toronto high school. George was head of the art department; Valerie was school counsellor. She knew George’s wife, a jittery, well-dressed woman, who was killed in a plane crash in Florida. George and his wife were separated by that time.

And, of course, Valerie knew Roberta because Roberta’s husband, Andrew, is her cousin. They never cared much for each other—Valerie and Roberta’s husband—and each of them has described the other to Roberta as a stick. Andrew used to say that Valerie was a queer-looking stick and utterly sexless, and when Roberta told Valerie that she was leaving him Valerie said, “Oh, good. He is such a stick.” Roberta was pleased to find such sympathy and pleased that she wouldn’t have to dredge up acceptable reasons; apparently Valerie thought his being a stick was reason enough. At the same time, Roberta had a wish to defend her husband and to inquire how on earth Valerie could presume to know whether he was a stick or wasn’t. She can’t get over wishing to defend him; she feels he had such bad luck marrying her.

When Roberta moved out and left Halifax, she came and stayed with Valerie in Toronto. There she met George, and he took her off to see his farm. Now Valerie says they are her creation, the result of her totally inadvertent matchmaking.

“It was the first time I ever saw love bloom at close quarters,” she says. “It was like watching an amaryllis. Astounding.”

But Roberta has the idea that, much as she likes them both and wishes them well, love is really something Valerie could do without being reminded of. In Valerie’s company you do wonder sometimes what all the fuss is about. Valerie wonders. Her life and her presence, more than any opinion she expresses, remind you that love is not kind or honest and does not contribute to happiness in any reliable way.

When she talked to Roberta about George (this was before she knew Roberta was in love with him), Valerie said, “He’s a mysterious man, really. I think he’s very idealistic, though he’d hate to hear me say that. This farm he’s bought. This self-sufficient, remote, productive life in the country.” She went on to talk about how he had grown up in Timmins, the son of a Hungarian shoemaker, youngest of six children and the first to finish high school, let alone go to university. “He’s the sort of person who would know what to do in a street fight but doesn’t know how to swim. He brought his old crabby, bent-over father down to Toronto and took care of him till he died. I think he drops women rather hard.”

Roberta listened to all this with great interest and a basic disregard, because what other people knew about George already seemed unessential to her. She was full of alarm and delight. Being in love was nothing she had counted on. The most she’d hoped for was a life like Valerie’s. She had illustrated a couple of children’s books and thought she could get more commissions; she could rent a room out in the Beaches, in East Toronto, paint the walls white, sit on cushions instead of chairs, and learn to be self-disciplined and self-indulgent, as she thought solitary people must be.

V
ALERIE
and Roberta walk through the house, carrying a bottle of cold wine and two of Valerie’s grandmother’s water goblets. Roberta thinks Valerie’s house is exactly what people have in mind when they say longingly “a house in the country” or, more particularly, “an old brick farmhouse.” The warm, pale-red brick with the light brick trim, the vines and elms, the sanded floors and hooked rugs and white walls, the chipped wash-jug set on a massive chest of drawers in front of a dim mirror. Of course, Valerie has had fifteen years to bring this
about. She and her husband bought the house as a summer place, and then when he died she sold their city house and moved to an apartment and put her money and her energy into this. George bought his house and land two years ago, having been introduced to this part of the country by Valerie, and fourteen months ago he left his teaching job and moved up here for good. On the heels of that move came his first meeting with Roberta. Last December she came to live with him. She thought that it would take them about a year to get the place fixed up, and then George could get back to doing his sculpting. A sculptor is what he really wants to be. That is why he wanted to give up teaching and live cheaply in the country—raise a lot of vegetables, keep chickens. He hasn’t started on the chickens yet.

Roberta meant to keep busy illustrating books. Why hasn’t she done this? No time, nowhere to work: no room, no light, no table. No clear moments of authority, now that life has got this new kind of grip on her.

What they have done so far—what George has done, mostly, while Roberta sweeps and cooks—is put a new roof on the house, put in aluminum-frame windows, pour bag after bag of dusty pebble-like insulation into the space behind the walls, fit batts of yellow, woolly-looking fiberglass against the attic roof, clean all the stovepipes and replace some of them and rebrick part of the chimney, replace the rotting eaves. After all these essential and laborious repairs the house is still unattractive on the outside, with its dark-red imitation-brick covering and its sagging porch heaped with drying new lumber and salvaged old lumber and extra batts of fiberglass and other useful debris. And it is dark and sour-smelling within. Roberta would like to rip up the linoleum and tear down the dismal wallpaper, but everything must be done in order, and George has figured out the order; it is no use ripping up and tearing down until the wiring and insulating have been finished and the shell of the house reconstructed. Lately he has been saying that before he starts on the inside of the house or puts the siding on the outside he must do a major job on the barn; if he doesn’t get the beam structure propped and strengthened the whole building may come down in next winter’s storms.

As well as this there is the garden: the apple and cherry trees,
which have been pruned; the raspberry canes, which have been cleaned out; the lawn, which has been reseeded, reclaimed from patches of long wild grass and patches of bare ground and rubble under the shade of some ragged pines. At first Roberta kept an idea of the whole place in her mind—all the things that had been done, that were being done, and that were yet to do. Now she doesn’t think of the work that way—she has no general picture of it—but stays in the kitchen and does jobs as they arise. Dealing with the produce of the garden—making chili sauce, preparing tomatoes and peppers and beans and corn for the freezer, making tomato juice, making cherry jam—has taken up a lot of her time. Sometimes she looks into the freezer and wonders who will eat all this—George and who else? She can feel her own claims shrinking.

T
HE TABLE
is laid on the long screened veranda at the back of the house. Valerie and Roberta go out a door at the end of the veranda, down some shallow steps, and into a little brick-walled, brick-paved area that Valerie has had made this summer but does not like to call a patio. She says you can’t have a patio on a farmhouse. She hasn’t decided yet what she does like to call it. She hasn’t decided, either, whether to get heavy wooden lawn chairs, which she likes the look of, or comfortable lightweight metal-and-plastic chairs, like those which George and Roberta brought.

They pour the wine and lift their glasses, the capacious old water goblets they love to drink wine from. They can hear Ruth and Eva and Angela laughing in Ruth’s bedroom. Ruth has said they must help her get into costume too—she is going to think of something that will outdo them all. And they can hear the swish of George’s scythe, which he has brought to cut the long grass and burdocks around Valerie’s little stone dairy house.

“The dairy house would make a lovely studio,” Valerie says. “I should rent it to an artist. George? You? I’d rent it for the scything and a raspberry bombe. George is going to make a studio in the barn, though, isn’t he?”

“Eventually,” says Roberta. At present all George’s work is in the front of the house, in the old parlor. Some half-finished and nearly
finished pieces are there, covered up with dusty sheets, and also some blocks of wood (George works only in wood)—a big chunk of seasoned oak and pieces of kiln-dried butternut and cherry. His ripsaw, his chisels and gouges, his linseed oil and turpentine and beeswax and resins are all there, the lids dusty and screwed tight. Eva and Angela used to go around and, standing on tiptoe in the rubble and weeds, peer in the front window at the shrouded shapes.

“Ugh, they look spooky,” Eva said to George. “What are they underneath?”

“Wooden doughnuts,” George said. “Pop sculpt.”

“Really?”

“A potato and a two-headed baby.”

Next time they went to look they found a sheet tacked up over the window. This was a grayish-colored sheet, torn at the top. To anybody driving by it made the house look even more bleak and neglected.

“Do you know I had cigarettes all the time?” Valerie says. “I have half a carton. I hid them in the cupboard in my room.”

She has sent David and Kimberly into town, telling them she’s out of cigarettes. Valerie can’t stop smoking, though she takes vitamin pills and is careful not to eat anything with red food coloring in it. “I couldn’t think of anything else to say I was out of, and I had to have them clear off for a while. Now I don’t dare smoke one or they’ll smell it when they get back and know I was a liar. And I want one.”

“Drink instead,” says Roberta. When she got here she thought she couldn’t talk to anybody—she was going to say her head ached and ask if she could lie down. But Valerie steadies her, as always. Valerie makes what isn’t bearable interesting.

“So how are you?” Valerie says.

“Ohhh,” says Roberta.

“Life would be grand if it weren’t for the people,” says Valerie moodily. “That sounds like a quotation, but I think I just made it up. The problem is that Kimberly is a Christian. Well, that’s fine. We could use a Christian or two. For that matter, I am not an un-Christian. But she is very noticeably a Christian, don’t you think? I’m amazed how mean she makes me feel.”

G
EORGE
is enjoying the scything. For one thing, he likes working without spectators. Whenever he works at home these days, he is aware of a crowd of female spectators. Even if they’re nowhere in sight, he feels as if they’re watching—taking their ease, regarding his labors with mystification and amusement. He admits, if he thinks about it, that Roberta does do some work, though she has done nothing to earn money as far as he knows; she hasn’t been in touch with her publishers, and she hasn’t worked on ideas of her own. She permits her daughters to do nothing all day long, all summer long. Yesterday morning he got up feeling tired and disheartened—he had gone to sleep thinking of the work he had to do on the barn, and this preoccupation had seeped into his dreams, which were full of collapses, miscalculations, structural treacheries—and he went out to the deck off the kitchen, thinking to eat his eggs there and brood about the day’s jobs. This deck is the only thing he had built as yet, the only change he has made in the house. He built it last spring in response to Roberta’s complaints about the darkness of the house and the bad ventilation. He told her that the people who built these houses did so much work in the sun that they never thought of sitting in it.