A Good House (10 page)

But late in the summer, when her condition became so evident it had to be taken into account, Daphne, meaning only to make a show of maturity, to be seen to be accepting of this baby and all its implications, brought the naming to the supper table as if she were absolutely entitled to do this, asking Bill as she added another possibility to her list, “So who named me?”

Margaret sat back and let them do it. Stephen it was. Stephen Thomas. Or Sarah Kathleen. Sally.

*   *   *

HOME FOR THE
summer in early May, Patrick had got a promotion at McFarlane's mill. He was now driving a one-ton truck around the countryside making deliveries, heaving sacks of feed on and off the truck, getting brown and bulking up. Late in the afternoon Margaret would lay out fresh underwear and pants and a shirt in the downstairs bathroom and watch for him at the kitchen window, listen for his footsteps on the gravel driveway. He'd come home coated in a cloud of feed dust and stand in the middle of the backyard to slap his pants and shirt hard and bend over to shake the dust from his hair and then he'd quickly strip to his underwear on the back porch, ducking into the bathroom to shove his head under the tap and wash for half an hour before anyone heard from him.

Although he had assumed he would, Patrick had not liked living in residence much at all. The room was a lot smaller than the bedroom he shared with Paul at home, and John, the roommate assigned by alphabetic proximity, was a loud-mouthed, back-slapping jock from Ottawa who called girls wimen and acted as if he'd just discovered booze and couldn't seem to get enough of either.

John introduced Patrick to his many, many friends and prodded him to come with them to the Brass Rail to find some friendly small-town wimen who might have their own apartments, their own apartments being the first and only consideration. Thinking there was a chance he had the guy all wrong, Patrick did go along for one of John's “crime and corruption” nights but at the end of it he found himself in the arms of a not very pretty girl who had no idea what was going on, who said almost nothing but welcomed him into her bed as if it meant something. Her own roommate was in the other bed with some other guy, not four feet away, moaning and whispering, and when everyone else fell asleep, he got dressed quickly and left. He didn't even want to remember the not very pretty girl's name.

He said nothing, certainly didn't tell Murray, and he turned down all further invitations. He watched John's marks nosedive and hoped he'd flunk out, thinking, If there's a God, this guy's gone. Some small hesitation had kept him from telling John that his mother had just died and by October he was glad he'd hesitated.

All his classes were huge. He hated that, the amphitheatres, the fact that not even the professors knew him by name. He and Murray ate lunch together between classes and they worked in the library, went to the odd Mustangs game, drank quietly at the Ceeps where they met but did not take up with several pretty, lively young women who were away from home for the first time too and game for almost anything anyone might propose.

But now it was summer and he wanted someone, needed someone. After several weeks delivering feed, twice to the Elliot farm, he had phoned Sandra Elliot to ask her to go out to the Casino dance on Saturday night. Sandra was going into grade twelve with Daphne and he remembered her from high school, vaguely. He'd heard from Daphne that she had just broken up with some guy from Parkhill and he assumed correctly that they had worked all this out ahead of him, that his call was expected. Both times when he'd pulled into the yard with feed Sandra was just coming out of the house, as if by chance, and when he'd finished unloading she leaned against the truck to talk to him, turned and lifted her head quickly to make her dark red hair swing. She focused on him with big easy smiles, used her posture to make sure he was aware of her breasts, and bending to pet one of the dogs, offered little glimpses of very white cheek not quite hidden by short shorts.

When he picked her up on the Saturday night, getting out of Margaret's Pontiac to go inside and meet the mother, Sandra came down the stairs in a sundress her mother said she'd got an A for in Home Economics. It was dark red with a full skirt and thin straps which Sandra identified, when they were in the car on their way out to the lake, as spaghetti straps. Spaghetti straps required a strapless bra, she told him.

Less than a year later, when they were finally finished with each other, Patrick guessed it was the irresistible weight of her breasts against those straps, that and nothing much else that had got him through the summer.

The Casino sat high in the dunes above Lake Huron. It was large and square, cream stucco with a dark red roof. Downstairs there were slot machines on a gritty cement floor, not very clean washrooms, and long benches against the cement-block walls. There was a concession where swimmers and sunbathers could buy potato chips or Coppertone for their tans, and, beside it, a big pop cooler. You had to lift the lid and reach down through ice water for a bottle of Coke or Canada Dry or Orange Crush and more than once a kid who had just come in after hours and hours of playing in the afternoon sun stuck an arm down and promptly slumped to the gritty cement floor, out cold.

Upstairs, the hardwood dance floor was surrounded by a wraparound balcony with shutters that could be dropped quickly if a storm came up off the lake. You could stand out there between dances and listen to the waves lapping on the sand and stare out over the shining water toward Michigan. Or you could look up at the stars and the moon in the dark sky above the water, at the clouds that threatened to obliterate the light as they drifted across it. Patrick had been coming out to the Casino dances since he was fifteen and he had never once been with a girl who didn't like to do this, who didn't soften looking out at the water or up at the sky.

The band was always the same. They played mostly country and western with a few polkas and square dances thrown in, sometimes a jive. On a good night they could be talked into trying “Sixteen Tons” or “Moments to Remember” or “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Heartbreak Hotel.” There was no booze, not inside anyway, not that you could see.

Patrick and Sandra recognized nearly everyone around them but they danced only together, oblivious to the people they would ordinarily dance with at least once or twice. And no one bothered them because a first date gave you that right, to ignore people you knew, to pretend you couldn't see their faces, couldn't hear them speaking even though they surrounded you, same as always.

On the way home after the dance they didn't talk as much as Patrick had thought they would. Standing on her porch under a naked two-hundred-watt bulb that lit the entire yard and half the barn, with one of the black Labs thumping its tail eagerly against his legs, he leaned in to kiss her and when she kissed him back, he took his chance to cup her heavy breast in his hand. But she pulled the hand away and wrapped it around her back. He assumed she had a set of rules in mind. Although it was the biggest breast he'd touched, it wasn't the first. And a guy could be forgiven. The rules varied from girl to girl, more than you'd think.

The Wednesday night after the Casino dance he took her into Sarnia to a show, a war movie, which they watched low in their seats, holding hands as soon as the plot was well established, Patrick's arm quickly closing in around her shoulders. On the way home after the show there was finally quite a bit of talk. Sandra started it by saying how sorry she was about his mother's death and when he tensed up she quickly said she understood how awful it must be for his family. She told him she was sure it would make him feel better to talk about it, that she really believed talking helped. When he reached to turn up the radio, meaning to say that the song shouldn't be missed, she was obviously annoyed that he wasn't even going to try to put it into words for her but she went on bravely to more ordinary things: what he was studying, what he wanted out of university, where she herself thought she might want to go when she graduated. The goodnight kisses took place in the dark of the car, although they were still too few for Patrick and his hand was still very firmly guided. He knew what he'd be doing, wasn't very happy about what he'd be doing when he got home into his own warm bed.

The show had been a slacks-and-sweater-set date but on the Friday night, when their only plan was to do something and Sandra appeared at her door in a pale pink angora sweater and a wraparound skirt, he drove straight out to Lake Huron. He made two slow trips up and down the beach, nodding and waving at the other guys, mostly high school types who were driving the beach with their girlfriends, and then he turned off to follow the road that twisted back to the inland lakes. He parked the car beside one of the smallest lakes and they leaned forward together to look up through the windshield at the stars. After what he believed was long enough, he said he'd check to see if there was a blanket in the trunk and she helped him spread it out on the soft grassy sand.

Sandra was easy enough to get along with. She laughed a lot and sometimes threw her head back when she did as if she'd never in her life had such a good time. He started to miss her through the week, got so he couldn't remember how he had filled his time before he'd asked her out.

He did miss Murray, who had stayed on alone in London, to work. They'd both decided that residence was not for them so before Patrick moved home they had hunted around one morning and found an apartment near the campus and Murray was living there until September, working at the Ancaster Inn on the other side of the city. When Patrick told Bill about their decision, explaining that residence was more than half full of assholes, it seemed to Bill that Patrick might be getting unnecessarily surly.

Their apartment had once been just the upstairs of a normal house. It had a narrow living room across the front with big windows overlooking Richmond Street, two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and off the kitchen a back porch with a staircase leading down to a derelict backyard. There was an old fridge, a stove that was on its last legs, and a grey arborite table with two red chairs. They had borrowed a truck to pick up a couch and a couple of armchairs at the Sally Ann, bought two twin beds at Eaton's, and raided Margaret's stash in the basement at home for lamps and curtains and pots and pans and dishes and cutlery.

Patrick and Murray tried to describe their apartment one night when everyone was in the living room watching
I Love Lucy.
Bill's face looked attentive but he laughed nearly every time Lucy opened her mouth, pounding the arms of his chair in appreciation. Margaret wouldn't let Bill watch his other favourite show,
The Honeymooners,
not if she was around anyway, because growing up she'd had enough of sloppy, angry men screaming to last her two lifetimes and how could this possibly, possibly be funny?

She had understood for a long time that the invective at her own girlhood kitchen table, the blind faith in strict rules and the outrage that followed their breaking, had been prompted mostly by a sick longing for order, for a kind of peace, and she knew this longing was not unusual, probably not even despicable. But now, from the vantage point of middle age, standing at the kitchen sink, at her kitchen sink, she recognized that all of it together had been nothing more than ordinary selfishness and stupidity and perhaps even laziness, all of it together had only been her father's way to make things easier for himself.

She guessed Bill likely turned on
The Honeymooners
when she wasn't home. He'd told her that Art Carney was the one to watch, not Gleason, said the way Carney survived Gleason was what made it so enjoyable.

In a commercial for Everlasting pots and pans, when the boys saw the chance to bring everyone's attention back to themselves, they announced that neither Margaret nor Daphne would be allowed to come in to clean their apartment. This claim to independence caused a look to pass quickly from Margaret to Daphne, one look among the many they would come to perfect between them, “the repertoire” it would eventually be called, after enough time had passed.

Sometimes Patrick and Sandra drove into London to see Murray. They would pick him up for an early show or just sit around talking before he had to go to work at midnight. Sometimes they arrived with groceries and Sandra made her Home Economics recipe for chili or stuffed green peppers or apple crisp. A few times a month they stayed overnight, telling everyone Murray was going to be there when he wasn't.

Because Murray never had anyone at the apartment and because he drove home every time he had a couple of days off, Patrick assumed he had nothing special going for him in the city and it seemed reasonable to ask Sandra to set him up with someone. She soon had several possibles for consideration but Murray wasn't biting. He worked, he slept, he drove home to see his parents, he went over to the house as usual to spend some time talking to Daphne or Paul or to Bill and Margaret.

Patrick didn't say so directly, but he thought Murray's reluctance was peculiar. He couldn't comprehend why Murray was dragging his feet, especially since Sandra was willing to help with the hard part and the rewards were substantial. But he gave it up, carried on alone, left Murray out of it.

He had started to go out to Sandra's and sit around on the porch with her father and the dogs if she was washing her hair or something, and soon he didn't have to ask her out any more, she'd just tell him if she had to do something else. They would go to a show or lie around one house or the other watching television until they couldn't stand it any longer and then they would drive out to the lake to find a private depression in a grassy dune.

Like Daphne, Sandra had two more years of high school, and one night out at the inland lakes after they'd spread the blanket on the sand, at her insistence they began to discuss a time other than the present. Sandra didn't see the future as he did, as something entirely unknown but wide open, she saw the future as something you could put together, something you could cut out and assemble, like a red sundress. “What we need to have,” she told him, “are concrete plans.”