Small Change (19 page)

It’s rare to see anyone at this hour. Children are having their dinner, people walk their dogs later in the evening. Ivy stays alert though, and if she hears footsteps or voices she
Stands and makes her way along the path, taking her time, a housewife out on a stroll.

Away from the photographs she feels unburdened, her own childhood not so far away. She liked to hide things as a child, one of her mother’s rings, for instance, which she couldn’t find, then found and is wearing now, a small pearl ring which clicks against her wedding band. Her mother called her a clever squirrel.

She fishes inside her bag for the flask but her fingers stop on something else – a snapshot of her grandson holding a camera. A Pentax, and the grandson only eight. He loves to take pictures and he’s so good at it, she’ll say, justifying the incredible expense. She sent him the camera for his birthday.

I had forgotten the camera until now. The first time I met Ivy she pulled the snapshot out of her purse, dispelling one photographer with another and in a way so innocent, so unconscious, as to beggar description.

There’s something else. Ivy did more than lead me over to the piano as soon as we walked into the house. She pointed to the youthful photograph on the piano top. “In this one,” she said with a proud and quiet smile, “I’m pregnant with Karen.” Pregnant – subtly pregnant – with the girl who played the piano and “died.”

What I felt was a circling noose, a mother’s circling noose, a self-congratulatory and pregnant mother making of something terrible a delicate and dishonest thing. Tending the shrine of a dead child and writing off everything in between, everything but the smooth and shiny piano and the smooth and shiny belly, the smooth and shiny secret since her belly
wasn’t noticeably pregnant (I had to be told). This is what is meant by loyalty to someone’s memory. It’s what gives loyalty, and memory, a bad name.

She entrusted me with this information. Held my hand before we left, looked into my eyes and willed me to see things her way. But here I am seeing things my way. Here I am trying to give disloyalty a good name.

W
e were on a long ride home from the sea. Milt was driving, Lorna was reading aloud, I was listening in the back seat. We had set out early when it was cool and would get home late the next night when it was still warm. It was the end of summer. We stopped only a few times, once to cool our feet in the ocean, more often to get gas, almost never to eat: Lorna had made chicken and ham sandwiches and she passed them around. We drove late into the night, stopping at a motel where we shared a room, then on again in the morning.

Looking over at Milt and back at me, Lorna asked if she should keep on reading and we nodded. I think we both felt flattered and touched that she would expose herself to us so trustingly. I think we believed that she wouldn’t have done it with anyone else. It felt like a gift, this reading. The book was one she had loved as a girl and still loved, she reread it
every summer without fail. It was a sentimental story about spunky imaginative Jane who reunites her estranged parents and finds paradise on Prince Edward Island. I listened. I knew the book. It had never been one of my favourites.

For two days Lorna poured cups of black coffee first from one thermos, then another. After dark she opened the glove compartment and poured by the small light inside, her small hands moving in the light of nonexistent gloves and reminding me of other things that remain only in name. We were a threesome, pleased with our friendship and gratified to be liked as the story unfolded and we made our way west. We drove along a highway bereft of trees, away from a summer house to which she was so attached that she allowed herself some tears.

The summer house was large and on a hill. It was everything they wanted their lives to be – gracious, open, relaxed and important, connected to the past and to every change in weather. It stood higher than anything else on the horizon and in its shelter they almost relaxed. They were profoundly shy, this couple. You went to their house for dinner, their enclosed and quiet city house, and they made you sit by yourself in the living room while they scurried about the kitchen.
No
, if you tried to enter or offered to help, go sit down, we’ll be with you in five minutes. And you went back and sat in one of their high-backed chairs.

The house was old and beautiful. There were plants, there were fish in an aquarium, there was life – but none of it easy. You sensed what it cost them to have company, how hard they found everything, especially talking, and you felt for them and liked them for it. You wanted to help them
relax, knowing they would be grateful forever if you did. They drank a lot. Sour red wines and Scotch.

My view of the road ahead was framed by the windshield of the old car and by their two sandy-coloured heads. Lorna’s long braid wound around her head twice in an old-fashioned style that would have been motherly had Lorna been motherly. She was small, slender and pale. She dressed with great care. She avoided the sun. She almost never laughed. I remember her posture and wonder now if she took ballet as a child; we didn’t talk very much about childhood. I knew that her parents had money, that she had gone to a sort of finishing school in France, that her mother often told her not to borrow trouble, an expression I had never heard before and liked. Milton’s background was more rough-and-tumble, and his back was cement-like: head, neck, shoulders fixed by the grim determination so central to his character. He toiled in and through his anger which for all his plumpness was not the least bit innocuous.

Lorna’s voice carried well. Occasionally she looked to make sure Milt wasn’t grimacing, or asked if this was too much. He answered no, go on. He was in the mood to find her constancy charming, he had touched her hand when she wiped away her tears. She read about the ideal man – rustic, charming, artistic and kind – as different from Milt as can be imagined. Milt was short, crude and sour. He was ambitious and tense. He was quick to anger and long to hold a grudge. Yet he must have exerted considerable charm when he first met Lorna. His eyes, she said, were what attracted her. Those eyes.

It was easier to see what Milton saw in Lorna than what she saw in him. She was beautiful. She had an upper-class air reinforced but also softened by a sort of censorious neediness. She was always late and often flustered in a way that men like to indulge; yet she was quick to feel disdain for others. So was he. They shared a snobbishness that I disliked very much. But they liked and trusted me, and that goes a long way. They were very good to me.

They took turns, driving fast and well. Only once did I take the wheel and soon they took it back with smiles indulgent and patronizing. They were united by their forward push, relentless and driven, too rigid to be graceful yet seductive even so. I couldn’t take my eyes off the passage of coffee from her small left hand to his tough and pudgy fingers.

A few months after our long drive home, Lorna phoned late and asked to come over: she had to talk. It would have been early December, there was snow on the ground and she was wearing a dark grey winter coat. She came in and tossed a newspaper on the table. Milt wanted things from her, she said, and not for the first time either.

I picked up the paper. It was folded open to a page of ads for garter belts and G-strings, black lace underwear and the most amazing brassieres. The ink on the page seemed heavy and smeared, the print was tiny. I put down the paper, went into the kitchen, and made tea.

Lorna was agitated and funny, more talkative in her distress than she had ever been or would be again. Her small white hands held mug after mug of tea.

The doorbell rang while she was in the bath. He stood in the doorway and his eyes – those eyes – were sick with worry. He was simple for a few minutes, sitting with me in the living room, saying that he would be lost without her. We heard her move around upstairs: footsteps, a door closing, the suggestion of clothing. I pictured black lace over skin that never saw the light, and light – small light fingers – buttoning things tight.

She came downstairs, her storybook hair unpinned and falling to Alice in Wonderland length. Milt went to her and kissed her forehead.

Lorna was remarkable for the care she lavished on her body, the lotions rubbed into face, neck, arms, elbows, legs, feet, the array of makeup carefully applied, the time all this took, and then the covering up. She buttoned her high collars tight and her long sleeves at the cuffs. She washed her extravagantly long hair every day – it came down to her bottom – only to wind it tightly around her head.

Everything had a lid. The bath salts were in a lovely wooden bowl and the bowl had a lid, the cottonballs were in a wooden box and the box had a lid, the tissues were in another wooden box and the Q-tips in another lidded bowl. She bathed every morning and every night, taking her time, making the bath last. After midnight she slipped on her old brown bathrobe and went down the hall to their bedroom where the furnishings were antiques, the curtains white lace, the dresser and bedside tables covered with doilies. Lorna would drop the robe to the floor, jump into bed, and pull the covers up to her chin.

Once, with the wistful sourness, the guarded openness, so typical of her, she told me that she and Milt might as well be ships passing in the hall at night. She said, if only he had a twinkle in his eye when he said it. If only, when he finished the paper at eleven and folded it and fixed her with his hard, impassive look, he had a twinkle in his eye when he said he was going up to bed.

Once she told me that whenever she left the house, even for an hour, she was terrified it wouldn’t be there when she got back.

Those were troubled times for me. I had left my marriage, I was leaving my job, I was planning to go away. My doings seemed to entertain or at least distract her. She would arrive in mid-afternoon and stay an hour, talking so little that I talked too much. She offered me her loneliness and a certain gratitude (women used to visit each other this way, in the afternoons, with calling cards in their handbags). I bent to the task of cheering her up, proud of my ability to lighten her mood. It did us both good, I used to think: she needed a chum to balance her husband, I needed to be taken out of myself. It was work though. She was dispirited, heavy, and once or twice, insulting. Out of the blue she would twit me about something, my writing or my disorganized life, a small well-placed sneer that would surprise me.

Months went by and she did not mention her marriage. She never again referred to the ads, or, indeed, to Milt in a personal way. Apparently they had come to some accommodation. They had resumed their old pact or arrived at a new one.

I was part of the pact. I was the unthreatening confidante who provided the companionship that Milt failed to provide. Before me there had been someone else, a medical student called Debbie who had moved to Vancouver with her husband. Lorna had one close friend at a time. She chose you the way some men choose a wife. She set her cap for you. There was nothing oblique about her wooing. A dinner invitation, then steady phone calls, more invitations, an unvarying tone of sustained attention that would last, it seemed, for ever. I have to say that it was very nice. She called every day when I was sick, she checked on me whenever I was upset, she gave me gifts at Christmas, she remembered my birthday. I still have the complete Jane Austen she gave me and I still reread
Persuasion
because I love to follow the unfolding of Anne Elliot’s second chance.

Lorna never had a best friend that Milt didn’t approve. I suspect we were always of the same type: steady, serious, respectable, unalarmed. No high-strung failures, no boozy misfits, no giddy dames.

Then one day her tone changed. This happened about a month after I told her I was going away for the winter, and about two months before I left. I called her one morning at ten o’clock and her greeting was so brusque it took me aback. I spoke to her for a few minutes but everything I said made her impatient. This is new, I thought, she has never spoken to me like this before. She is speaking to me the way she speaks about everyone else. A few days later she told me that she had taken Susan to the symphony.

Where had she first taken me? The theatre. Stratford. Two plays in one day. She had driven their dark-blue Volvo and driven well, with the same hard determination I was seeing again as she swerved away from me and pursued a new direction.

A week before I left Toronto, Lorna and Susan gave me a going-away party. The party would have been Lorna’s idea, an excuse to phone Susan frequently and a way to entrench their friendship. Many people came and I think everyone had a good time. I stayed late, talking to old friends beside the aquarium. The food was plentiful and good. After everyone had gone Milt and Lorna slipped under my arm a brown leather folder of satin-white writing paper. It was very kind, but I knew I was being eased out and it made me bitter.

I went to Mexico for several months. In the second week I wrote to Lorna on her writing paper, thanking her for the party and telling her about the widow I was staying with, the Spanish classes I was taking. Three months later I received a letter from her. I read it with pleasure, she said she thought about me all the time, but I did not write back. I came home in June. From the airport I took a cab to Susan’s where I would stay for a few days until I found an apartment to rent for the summer. Susan opened the door and behind her stood pale Lorna. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. They embraced me in the hallway and we sat down, probably with a glass of wine, in the living room. Lorna took the green armchair to the right of the white fireplace. Susan sat on the grey sofa on the left. I sat in the other green armchair near
the door. We talked a little about Mexico and a lot about Toronto. Most of what I said I addressed to Susan. Then, knowing exactly what I was doing, I scolded Susan affectionately for not writing to me more often. From her chair beside the fireplace Lorna said, “Did you get my letter?” Her face was puzzled and hurt.