A Good House (33 page)

Sometimes he was sly, sneaky, oblique. When he complained to visitors about Margaret's stupidity, how she couldn't seem to stop blowing fuses, how she would use nothing but cushy expensive toilet paper, how she wasted his gas making small trips back and forth all over town, he couched it all in a late-twentieth-century concern for waste. He looked right at Margaret and called her
she.

Standing at her sink or sweeping the back porch or sitting waiting for Doctor Mang to save two more of her teeth, Margaret was very thankful for the healthy function of her own brain, which she could still count on to click into gear more or less as it was meant to. She would rather be dead a thousand times over than live on the way he did. But of course that's what he would have said too, before. When she thought these words she heard his young man's voice, content again with an ordinary young man's strength, speaking them, “I'd rather be dead a thousand times over.”

As it was, he didn't mean to die at all. He talked about death's avoidance matter-of-factly, as if the ending of a life was a virus that smart people could protect themselves from, given enough common sense. He gathered what he called the relevant information. He went to the doctor almost weekly, had himself thoroughly checked over even if it was only heartburn that had got him his appointment. He boldly printed the number 911 on a piece of cardboard he'd stapled to the cupboard above the phone in the kitchen, in case he was struck, he said, when she'd left him on his own. He told her that her main job was to protect him from stress, from other people's nonsense. He said it could kill him.

After Paul was gone they had faded off in their nighttime attentions to each other, settling instead for the occasional comfort of sleeping warmly bum to bum. When he'd started up again, started to grab at her like some randy kid, snorting when she tried to settle him down, apparently propelled by her resistance, she left their bed to sleep in Daphne's room. And then she had decided it might help. She returned to him, tried to teach him his own forgotten style, the ways and means. He would have none of it. When she tried to cuddle into him, as he used to urge her to do, he took her by the shoulders and pinned her to her pillow, his strength recalled abruptly, as if he'd had it just yesterday. He prodded her and moved her limbs around to suit himself, turned her over and over again, slapped her rear not playfully but hard.

Margaret had lived a very long time without a rough hand on her body and now here it was. She moved permanently into Daphne's room, bought herself a new, firm mattress and a thick duvet, filled the empty closet and the dresser with her clothes and her mementoes, with the few pieces of nice jewellery she hardly ever wore now, most of them gifts from the kids. She slipped away during a shopping trip to Sarnia with Andy to buy a dead-bolt lock, which she kept in its box under the bed until one day she got the nerve to take the drill and the screwdriver upstairs. Bill followed her up, sat on her bed and watched her struggle with the instructions until the thing was secured on the door. She kept the key on a long string around her neck, wore it wet in the bathtub.

He had struck her only once, otherwise. She'd told him she was taking the car down to the garage to get the oil changed, that she was going to leave the car and they would bring her back right away. When he called from his chair to say that it was his car, he would decide when the oil needed changing, she picked up the keys from the basket on the counter and said he mustn't worry about it, she had arranged that they would keep the car for only an hour or so, and then she heard him leave his chair. He came into the kitchen and charged her. When he grabbed the keys, she'd told him, only firmly, she thought, kindly, “I'll take those keys, thank you.” And then the slap.

It was the sound that would stay with her, loud for a simple smack, that and the heat of his open hand on her cheek. The pain wasn't much. She'd banged her hip bone harder on the counter going out the door too fast, many times. But she could feel her skin burning with the rush of blood and she expected him, seeing it, to feel her shock, perhaps to cry. When he didn't she pried the keys loose from his clenched fist, digging her nails into his flesh to give him something else to think about. At the door she turned back, said, “You go and sit down.” And he did.

Uptown she stopped at the grocery store to buy him a half gallon of Butter Brickle ice cream. When the Vanderlinde boy dropped her off home she quickly presented it to him, soft in the bowl the way he preferred it, and he reached for it eagerly. “How nice, Sylvia,” he said. “Just the thing for a day like today.”

For the first while, old friends still came to see him with some regularity. A few men, a few women. He was during that time unaccountably affectionate, generous, and false. He began to kiss women on the cheek when he shook their hands, women he had just seen the week before, women who had never been particularly important to him but who had the time now to visit around town. No one knew where he'd seen this gesture or why he took it as his own.

After the kiss he would graciously offer a chair and then sit down himself and begin to talk, looking, as he talked, up at the ceiling as if it was all recorded there to prompt him. If visitors interrupted him with a possible change in direction for the conversation, mentioning perhaps their own grandchildren, or a recent, unusual trip, or a slight variation on something he'd said, he would resume, undaunted. “Anyway,” he'd say. If he was interrupted once too often, he would stop talking altogether and listen intently, hating every word spoken, and at the end of it, before the door was fully closed, he would call out to Margaret in the kitchen, “Lock up if you see that particular battle-axe coming my way again.”

Once the McKellars from down the street brought over their only great-granddaughter, who was a nurse in training in Kitchener. She had driven two hours to see them because the McKellars always helped her with a small cheque at Christmas. This pretty young nurse in training sat down beside Bill on the couch to look at the Florida pictures and, perhaps thinking that what she offered was compassion, perhaps thinking that here was the chance for a practical application of what she'd learned, she took his hand. When she called him “honey,” Margaret wanted to lean over and slug her. Because there was absolutely nothing else she could do to stop it.

The first two times the young woman said the word, Bill stopped talking, stopped turning the pages altogether, which was meant to be a clue, and after the third time he threw her hand off his own, looked directly at Stan McKellar, and said, “Honey, my ass.”

Oh, Margaret thought, you bet, Bill. This one you can have. Then she made an offer of more tea, which the McKellars gratefully took as their chance to go home.

*   *   *

PATRICK AND MURRAY
and Daphne and Sarah believed it was Paul's death. They had said this to Margaret alone and in pairs and all together. They said psychological shock was a phenomenon that was little understood and they seemed happy to take their comfort from this. But she knew it was not Paul's death. It was Bill's brain cells, so minuscule they couldn't even be imagined, his brain cells collapsing inside his skull, dying off, exploding as silently as the stars she had seen dying on television. It was his death, enjoying itself coming slowly.

At eighty-one Margaret understood death's ways and means with a clarity she would never have anticipated and she half surrendered herself to this understanding, as if the surrendering could go some way toward appeasement. Death could come hard and fast, as it had come to Paul, ensuring that nothing could get done, nothing could get said before and not much after that was any use to anyone. Or it could come over a few decent months, as it had come all those years before to Sylvia, giving everyone time but not too much of it, not so much you couldn't get through it. It could come with the thunderous, bloody repetition of slaughter on the other side of an ocean, having itself a heyday in the muddy fields of France. Or it could come in slow time, taking show-off, brazen, slow-march strides. It could let you watch, knowing with cocky confidence that you wouldn't look away.

Margaret missed Sarah. Sarah's absence was almost the hardest thing on her plate. After their first few years out west, unable to discipline herself to silence, she had asked about the possibility of a transfer back for Rob, his company was national and had sent him out there in the first place, but Sarah had said no, it didn't look like they could come back. They were going to make their life in Vancouver.

They did return every two or three years to visit and Sarah came immediately for Paul of course. And Margaret still had her open invitation. But she had never gone, never flown out, never flown anywhere in her life. They'd got to Florida all those years ago on their own, driving, and they had taken the car to Expo, too, just the two of them, she and Bill fighting through the Montreal traffic, staying at the private home of an older French couple who had opened very pleasant rooms to paying visitors. Although they had liked what they saw, especially liked trying all the food, some of which they had never even heard of, when they got back home, very tired and disorientated, they decided they weren't really travellers. The crowds especially had got to Margaret. So those two were the only trips they'd taken, except for a half-dozen times over to Detroit to see a ball game and of course once in a blue moon in to Toronto.

Sarah was disappointed that Margaret wouldn't get on a plane and fly out to Vancouver but she knew enough to stop coaxing. She said what they didn't spend on airfare they should spend on pictures and phone calls, so there were albums filled up and regular Sunday telephone visits. Margaret made notes for herself before the phone calls so she could be sure to give Sarah just the most significant news. Sometimes, if she'd called after eleven when the rates dropped, she would relax maybe a bit too much and talk about people Sarah didn't remember at all and Sarah would bluff her way through it, saying, Yes, she remembered Norma Fawcett and yes, she remembered the damage from that November storm, and then she'd kick in with her own news and complaints and modest boasting: the extended deck, seven-year-old Natalie honoured at school for her confidence, her brother Jake, so old for nine, playing the guitar, imitating some kind of music from Seattle, the bonehead neighbours with their yappy dog.

Margaret had early on asked Sarah to draw her a floor plan of their never-painted wood house in Vancouver so she would know what she was looking at when she saw the pictures, know where Sarah stood with the phone in her hand. And for Christmas, two years earlier, they'd sent a VCR, which meant that Margaret now had tapes to watch in the afternoons: Sarah's kitchen with not a thing out of place, not one stray crumb, their living room, all glass and leather and chrome like something in an expensive magazine, Rob cutting the grass, diagonally, making a nice pattern; Sarah on her treadmill, her hair a helped-along blond, her middle thick like Margaret's own but her legs still as finely shaped as Betty Grable's; Natalie lying in a chaise in her bathing suit, reading a paperback book, showing little enthusiasm for the camera; Sarah and Rob dressed up to go out for the evening with the neighbours with the yappy dog; Rob bare-chested in tartan boxers, scraping moss off the deck, getting ready to treat it with something or other.

Watching with her, Bill said, every time, “He won't win against that moss. Any halfwit could see they have no business living there. It's not a fit place for housing. It's always been a forest and that's what it means to be.”

Sarah could read between the lines as well as anyone and she'd had several long phone calls from Patrick, just so she would know what was happening, he told her when he called. She did understand that her father was going through something extremely difficult but it was all entirely in the abstract for her because there was nothing she could do except listen to whatever got said and babble on about life as she knew it. Life as she knew it a continent away in a magnificent city tucked between the mountains and the ocean, with friends and neighbours and colleagues more likely to be called Wong than Chambers.

Although Daphne was settled into the McFarlane house, she didn't come over any more, ever. She was almost worn out, driving back and forth from the hospital in Sarnia, still working shift. She did welcome Margaret into her own kitchen and she did send the girls to visit Bill, Maggie occasionally when she was home from university for the weekend, Jill more often with jars of rhubarb jam or marmalade or loaves of lemon bread.

*   *   *

DAPHNE HAD CELEBRATED
her fifty-fifth birthday in March and the girls had given her a party. They'd sent invitations far and wide and opened the doors of the McFarlane house to over a hundred people. By all reports it was a blow-out affair. Murray and Kate drove up from Toronto, stopping in London for Patrick and Stephanie and Meg, from the home, and Andy came, and most of the kids. Friends came from Daphne's old apartment in the city, people who had known the girls when they were small, and from all three of the hospitals where Daphne had worked and from her years in training.

Some of Maggie's and Jill's own friends turned up a few days early to help get the house ready and several of Daphne's oldest friends, from town, from her own time as a girl, the people she had been getting to know again since moving back, helped the girls with the planning and the preparation of the food. The younger women stood around the dining-room table listening as the menu and its attendant complications were discussed, waiting for instruction, and soon, chopping a bag of onions or taking a cloth and a bottle of furniture polish to one more deep, dusty windowsill, they began to imitate these older, relaxed women, their confidence in the face of a big party, their casual talk of recipes for fifty, doubled. In particular, the younger women began to take as their own the much-repeated phrase “Just leave that to me,” laughing as they said it, assuming they'd screw up and hoping it wouldn't be noticed.