Selected Stories (60 page)

I

“I
DON’T KNOW
what color,” says Denise, answering a question of Magda’s. “I don’t really remember any color in this house at all.”

“Of course you don’t,” says Magda sympathetically. “There was no light in the house, so there was no color. There was no attempt. So dreary, I couldn’t believe.”

As well as having the old, deep, light-denying veranda on the Log House torn down, Magda—to whom Denise’s father, Laurence, is now married—has put in skylights and painted some walls white, others yellow. She has hung up fabrics from Mexico and Morocco, and rugs from Quebec. Pine dressers and tables have replaced badly painted junk. There is a hot tub surrounded by windows and greenery, and a splendid kitchen. All this must have cost a lot of money. No doubt Laurence is rich enough now to manage it. He owns a small factory, near Ottawa, that manufactures plastics, specializing in window panels and lampshades that look like stained glass. The designs are pretty, the colors not too garish, and Magda has stuck a few of them around the Log House in inconspicuous places.

Magda is an Englishwoman, not a Hungarian as her name might suggest. She used to be a dancer, then a dancing teacher. She is a short, thick-waisted woman, still graceful, with a smooth, pale neck and a lovely, floating crown of silver-gold hair. She is wearing a plain
gray dress and a shawl of muted, flowery colors that is sometimes draped over the settee in her bedroom.

“Magda is style through and through,” Denise said once, to her brother, Peter.

“What’s wrong with that?” said Peter. He is a computer engineer in California and comes home perhaps once a year. He can’t understand why Denise is still so bound up with these people.

“Nothing,” said Denise. “But you go to the Log House, and there is not even a jumble of scarves lying on an old chest. There is a
calculated
jumble. There is not a whisk or bowl hanging up in the kitchen that is not the most elegant whisk or bowl you could buy.”

Peter looked at her and didn’t say anything. Denise said, “Okay.”

Denise has driven up from Toronto, as she does once or twice every summer, to visit her father and her stepmother. Laurence and Magda spend the whole season here, and are talking of selling the house in Ottawa, of living here year-round. The three of them are sitting out on the brick patio that has replaced part of the veranda, one Sunday afternoon in late August. Magda’s ginger pots are full of late-blooming flowers—geraniums the only ones that Denise can name. They are drinking wine-and-soda—the real drinks will come out when the dinner guests arrive. So far, there have been no preposterous arguments. Driving up here, Denise determined there wouldn’t be. In the car, she played Mozart tapes to steady and encourage herself. She made resolves. So far, so good.

Denise runs a Women’s Centre in Toronto. She gets beaten women into shelters, finds doctors and lawyers for them, goes after private and public money, makes speeches, holds meetings, deals with varied and sometimes dangerous mix-ups of life. She makes less money than a clerk in a government liquor store.

Laurence has said that this is a typical pattern for a girl of affluent background.

He has said that the Women’s Centre is a good idea for those who really need it. But he sometimes wonders.

What does he sometimes wonder?

Frankly, he sometimes wonders if some of those women—some of them—aren’t enjoying all the attention they are getting, claiming to be battered and raped, and so on.

Laurence customarily lays the bait, Denise snaps it up. (Magda floats on top of these conversations, smiling at her flowers.)

Taxpayers’ money. Helping those who won’t help themselves. Get rid of acid rain, we lose jobs; your unions would squawk.

“They’re not
my
unions.”

“If you vote New Democrat, they’re your unions. Who runs the New Democrats?”

Denise can’t tell if he really believes what he says, or half believes it, or just feels compelled to say these things to her. She has gone out in tears more than once, got into her car, driven back to Toronto. Her lover, a cheerful Marxist from a Caribbean island, whom she doesn’t bring home, says that old men, successful old men, in a capitalist industrial society are almost purely evil; there is nothing left in them but raging defenses and greed. Denise argues with him too. Her father is not an old man, in the first place. Her father is a good person, underneath.

“I’m sick of your male definitions and airtight male arguments,” she says. Then she says thoughtfully, “Also, I’m sick of hearing myself say ‘male’ like that.” She knows better than to bring up the fact that if she lasts through the argument, her father will give her a check for the Centre.

Today her resolve has held. She has caught the twinkle of the bait but has been able to slip past, a clever innocent-seeming fish, talking mostly to Magda, admiring various details of house renovation. Laurence, an ironic-looking, handsome man with a full gray mustache and soft, thinning gray-brown hair, a tall man with a little sag now to his shoulders and his stomach, has got up several times and walked to the lake and back, to the road and back, has sighed deeply, showing his dissatisfaction with this female talk.

Finally he speaks abruptly to Denise, breaking through what Magda is saying.

“How is your mother?”

“Fine,” says Denise. “As far as I know, fine.”

Isabel lives far away, in the Comox Valley, in British Columbia.

“So—how is the goat-farming?”

The man Isabel lives with is a commercial fisherman who used to be a TV cameraman. They live on a small farm and rent the land, or
part of it, to a man who raises goats. At some point, Denise revealed this fact to Laurence (she has taken care not to reveal the fact that the man is several years younger than Isabel and that the relationship is periodically “unstable”), and Laurence has ever since insisted that Isabel and her paramour (his word) are engaged in goat-farming. His questions bring to mind a world of rural hardship: muddy toil with refractory animals, poverty, some sort of ghastly outdated idealism.

“Fine,” says Denise, smiling.

Usually she argues, points out the error in fact, accuses him of distortion, ill will, mischief.

“Enough counterculture left out there to buy goat milk?”

“I would think so.”

Laurence’s lips twitch under his mustache impatiently. She keeps on looking at him, maintaining an expression of innocent, impudent cheerfulness. Then he gives an abrupt laugh.

“Goat milk!” he says.

“Is this the new in-joke?” says Magda. “What am I missing? Goat milk?”

Laurence says, “Magda, did you know that on my fortieth birthday Denise took me up in a plane?”

“I didn’t actually fly it,” says Denise.

“My fortieth birthday, 1969. The year of the moon shot. The moon shot was actually just a couple of days after. She’d heard me say I often wished I could get a look at this country from a thousand feet up. I’d go over it flying from Ottawa to Toronto, but I’d never see anything.”

“I only paid enough for him to go up, but as it happened we all went up, in a five-seater,” Denise says. “For the same price.”

“We all went except Isabel,” says Laurence. “Somebody had to bow out, so she did.”

“I made him drive—Dad drive—blindfolded to the airport,” says Denise to Magda. “That is, not drive blindfolded”—they were all laughing—
“ride
blindfolded, so he wouldn’t know where we were going and it would be a complete surprise.”

“Mother drove,” says Laurence. “I imagine I could have driven blindfolded better. Why did she drive and not Isabel?”

“We had to go in Grandma’s car. The Peugeot wouldn’t take us all,
and I had to have us all go to watch you because it was my big deal. My present. I was an awful stage manager.”

“We flew all down the Rideau Lake system,” Laurence says. “Mother loved it. Remember she’d had a bad experience that morning, with the hippies? So it was good for her. The pilot was very generous. Of course he had his wife working. She made cakes, didn’t she?”

Denise says, “She was a caterer.”

“She made my birthday cake,” says Laurence. “That same birthday. I found that out later.”

“Didn’t Isabel?” says Magda. “Didn’t Isabel make the cake?”

“The oven wasn’t working,” says Denise, her voice gone cautionary and slightly regretful.

“Ah,” says Magda. “What was the bad experience?”

W
HEN
Denise and Peter and their parents arrived at the Log House every summer from Ottawa, the children’s grandmother Sophie would be there already, having driven up from Toronto, and the house would be opened, aired, and cleaned as much as it was ever going to be. Denise would run through all the dim cavelike rooms and hug the lumpy cushions, making a drama out of her delight at being there. But it was a true delight. The house smelled of trodden bits of cedar, never-conquered dampness, and winter mice. Everything was always the same. Here was the boring card game that taught you the names of Canadian wildflowers; here was the Scrabble set with the Y and one of the U’s missing; here were the dreadful irresistible books from Sophie’s childhood, the World War I cartoon book, the unmatched plates, the cracked saucers Sophie used for ashtrays, the knives and forks with their faint, strange taste and smell that was either of metal or of dishwater.

Only Sophie would use the oven. She turned out hard roast potatoes, cakes raw in the middle, chicken bloody at the bone. She never thought of replacing the stove. A rich man’s daughter, now poor—she was an assistant professor of Scandinavian languages, and through most of her career university teachers were poor—she had odd spending habits. She always packed sandwiches to eat on a train trip, and
she had never visited a hairdresser, but she wouldn’t have dreamed of sending Laurence to an ordinary school. She spent money on the Log House grudgingly, not because she didn’t love it (she did) but because her instinct told her to put pots under leaks, to tape around warped window frames, to get used to the slant in the floor that indicated one of the foundation posts was crumbling. And however much she needed money, she wouldn’t have thought of selling off any of her property around the house—as her brothers long ago had sold the property on either side, most profitably, to cottagers.

Denise’s mother and father had a name for Sophie that was a joke between them, and a secret. Old Norse. It seemed that shortly after they had met, Laurence, describing Sophie to Isabel, had said, “My mother isn’t quite your average mom. She can read Old Norse. In fact, she
is
sort of an Old Norse.”

In the car on the way to the Log House, feeling Sophie’s presence ahead of them, they had played this game.

“Is an Old Norse’s car window ever mended with black tape?”

“No. If an Old Norse window is broken, it stays broken.”

“What is an Old Norse’s favorite radio program?”

“Let’s see. Let’s see. The Metropolitan Opera? Kirsten Flagstad singing Wagner?”

“No. Too obvious. Too elitist.”

“ ‘Folk Songs of Many Lands’?”

“What is an Old Norse breakfast?” said Denise from the back seat. “Porridge!” Porridge was her own most hated thing.

“Porridge with codfish,” said Laurence. “Never tell Grandma about this game, Denise. Where does an Old Norse spend a summer vacation?”

“An Old Norse never takes a summer vacation,” said Isabel severely. “An Old Norse takes a winter vacation. And goes North.”

“Spitzbergen,” said Laurence. “The James Bay Lowlands.”

“A cruise,” said Isabel. “From Tromso to Archangel.”

“Isn’t there a lot of ice?”

“Well, it’s on an icebreaker. And it’s very dark, because those cruises only run in December and January.”

“Wouldn’t Grandma think it was funny too?” said Denise. She pictured her grandmother coming out of the house and crossing the veranda
to meet them—that broad, strong, speckled old woman, with a crown of yellowish-white braids, whose old jackets and sweaters and skirts had some of the smell of the house, whose greeting was calmly affectionate though slightly puzzled. Was she surprised that they had got here so soon, that the children had grown, that Laurence was suddenly so boisterous, that Isabel looked so slim and youthful? Did she know how they’d been joking about her in the car?

“Maybe,” said Laurence discouragingly.

“In those old poems she reads,” said Isabel, “you know those old Icelandic poems, there is the most terrible gore and hacking people up—women particularly, one slitting her own kids’ throats and mixing the blood in her husband’s wine. I read that. And then Sophie is such a pacifist and Socialist, isn’t it strange?”

I
SABEL
drove into Aubreyville in the morning to get the birthday cake. Denise went with her to hold the cake on the way home. The plane ride was arranged for five in the afternoon. Only Isabel knew about it, having driven Denise to the airport last week. It was all Denise’s idea. She was worrying now about the clouds.

“Those streaky ones are okay,” said Isabel. “It’s the big piled-up white ones that could mean a storm.”

“Cumulus,” Denise said. “I know. Do you think Daddy is a typical Cancer? Home-loving and food-loving? Hangs on to things?”

“I guess so,” said Isabel.

“What did you think when you first met him? I mean, what attracted you? Did you know this was the person you were going to end up married to? I think that’s all so weird.”

Laurence and Isabel had met in the cafeteria of the university, where Isabel was working as a cashier. She was a first-year student, a poor, bright girl from the factory side of town, wearing a tight pink sweater that Laurence always remembered.

(“Woolworth’s,” said Isabel. “I didn’t know any better. I thought the sorority girls were kind of dowdy”)

The first thing she said to Laurence was “That’s a mistake.” She was pointing to his selection—shepherd’s pie.

Laurence was too embarrassed or too stubborn to put it back. “I’ve
had it before and it was okay,” he said. He hung about for a moment after he got his change. “It reminds me of what my mother makes.”

“Your mother must be an awful cook.”