Duet for Three (11 page)

Certainly she won't lift a finger for June herself, if that time comes. Frances will be ruthless. She will point out what her grandmother has taught her: that she has her own life, and must get on with it. Uncomfortably, June can also hear her saying, “After all, Mother, I know it isn't perfect, but you'll get used to it, you'll adjust.”

“You're late,” says Aggie, who has, for once, made supper.

“I told you I was going to see the nursing home.”

“So you did. I'd forgotten.”

Liar. Eyes don't lie. Aggie's features may be set in nonchalance, but June detects fear somewhere in the eyes.

She sets her own face to oblivious cheer. “You really should go. I was impressed. It's clean, and you'd like how bright it is, and there are no end of things to do. You can tell they take good care of people, too, and the administrator is really very nice.”

“Do you remember, June, in India years ago, and then in the States, when protesters would just go limp and police would have to carry away dead weights? Totally peaceful, but so effective.”

June had decided not to tell anyone about putting Aggie's name on the waiting list. She needs time, but she's sure that once she's accustomed to the idea herself, she will find it a precious and powerful secret, something like a pearl in her dealings with her mother.

“And that's what I'll do,” Aggie is saying. “I'll just lie down on the floor and you'll need a crane to move me.”

It's hard to keep a secret, though. It's such a big thing, this impending freedom, and confusing too. So many things are unspoken; and might they not become more real and less disputable if they were said? There ought to be somebody she could talk to, she should have someone to whom she can tell secrets.

Aggie, across the supper table, is looking at her defiantly. Apparently, she has made some point, which June has missed.

“Anyway, Mother,” she says, “I wasn't going to mention it yet, but I put your name on the waiting list while I was there. You have to do that because there are people lined up waiting. We can still talk about it, but I had to put your name down.”

Later, they go upstairs together to get Aggie ready for bed. June, walking slightly behind, her hand on her mother's elbow, steadying her in the cautious ascent, is surprised at how bent Aggie has become. Maybe she doesn't usually look too closely.

But tonight she sees the dimples of fat beneath the material of Aggie's dress. This newly noticed slumping of her mother's shoulders may be partly because of weight and age, but may also come from years spent leaning over things: June, the bread that had to be kneaded, the batter in bowls that had to be mixed, the tubs of washing that had to be scrubbed, and all the lines of print she has pursued. As well as Frances. All that has combined to bend her somewhat.

When June was in her gawky adolescence, Aggie used to say, “Stand up straight, for heaven's sake. Walk tall.” June would like to say now, “Straighten up, Mother.” Because this is no time to look at her and see frailty, or any sort of caving in.

It occurs to June that weakness could, in some instances, be a more powerful tactic than strength.

In her bath, when Aggie is in bed, she considers her own body. She dislikes waste, including flesh, and there is no waste on her, but something must be shrinking, because her skin seems to be coming loose in places. On her breasts and her stomach and her thighs, and on the undersides of her arms, there are little pluckings of skin that don't appear to be attached to anything. Aggie may bend, but it is June who is shrivelling, like those old people in the nursing home.

NINE

Waiting list, shit. Lying in bed, Aggie once more listens from a distance to the too-quick thumping of her heart.

One fast way for it to end, a pounding and, presumably, a stab of pain, and then — what? A dead weight, as threatened, for June to deal with.

It's a good thing only the aging, the old, know they may die at any moment. If the young knew, they would spend their lives in terror, paralysed. Like Frances, who hasn't learned yet that any step, one wrong move, may be fatal, so she can still dance off in all directions, trying variations. This is something Aggie taught her. She takes credit for her daring. When Frances was just a baby, Aggie would lean over her as she tried to lift her head, or roll over, or crawl, and then walk, and say, “Come on, you can do it, keep trying,” and eventually Frances would. And when she was learning to talk and count and read, Aggie would tell her, “Come on, you can say it, you can figure it out,” and now Frances can, and does, say anything. Now the situation is a little reversed, and she teaches Aggie words.

June nags Aggie about her food, and Frances about her smoking. Frances says, “Oh, Mother, leave me alone. We're all entitled to some sins, you know,” and grins. Aggie says, “Good God, June, a diet would kill me. I'd go into shock,” and laughs.

Maybe June likes telling people that they're going to die, and that somehow they will deserve it, having brought it on themselves. How did she learn to be so cautious and afraid? Surely, Aggie tries to recall, she must have told June the same things she told Frances: you can do it, try again. Certainly she told June no end of things when she still had her inside her body.

Too bad it isn't still possible to pray. But she realized years ago that prayers have a nasty way of being granted in ways that aren't at all what a person had in mind. She decided, when she gave them up, that whatever God there might be must have a devious and peculiar sense of humor.

However, the alternatives, wishing and hoping, appear in these circumstances to be flimsy tools.

Somewhere out there tonight is her name on a waiting list. Just that, her name written down, is a theft of sorts. Bits and pieces of her seem to be escaping.

She cannot, looking down her body, see beyond her chest, home of the heart; great lolloping bosoms, as they used to be called, drooping, a little painfully, one to each side. Beyond, further down, must be the tricky unpredictable part that is no longer holding its own.

Once, she looked down her body with pride. Well, she's still proud, but of different things. Then, it was round breasts that would fit nicely into a cupped hand, if there had been a hand willing to cup them, and a trim brown torso, a gentle little belly and such strong thighs — not long legs, but sturdy, compact ones.

But if the teacher was, for one thing, a man who didn't like shit on his boots, he was also a man who preferred darkness to light, and whose desire was for order. He was a teacher, but only in the classroom, no longer in a kitchen.

(“He was,” she said another time when Frances asked, “a man who arranged all his books in alphabetical order. By author.”

(“Yeah,” Frances nodded, “I see.”

(“What's that supposed to mean?” asked June. “What's wrong with that?”)

Who, Aggie wondered, among the people she later came to meet, was out watching in the dusk the evening they arrived, weary in the cool air, after a long, peculiar day, the first one of their marriage? Sullen and hungry, they drove along the dusty streets, passing red-brick houses with their broad verandahs, where people were sitting out watching the sun go down, drinking lemonade or tea and chatting. Did they know it was the new teacher and his new wife passing by? Did they think, “What a nice-looking young couple,” or “My goodness, there's a pair of thunderclouds”?

Aggie sat up straighter in the buggy. Odd, to live in a place where houses were separated only by strips of lawn, not acres. Odd, too, that when they stopped, it was in front of a house not distinguishable from the rest: another two-storey red brick with broad white-painted verandah, stone walk, and small front yard. Except that it was empty, a little overgrown out front, and curtainless. She pictured wandering into the wrong house by mistake, coming home from shopping.

While he unhitched the horse and handled the bags, she stood in the front hallway alone.

The place had a dry and dusty, closed-up smell, and yet it wasn't dusty; someone, it seemed, had come in and swept. A mystery intruder had also, she discovered in the kitchen, left eggs, milk, cheese, and fruit in the ice-box, which held a fresh block of ice, and bread and a cake in a cupboard. The banister going upstairs felt smooth and solid. The whole place seemed smooth and solid. Someone had also made up the bed in the largest of the three bedrooms. All this was very kind, and it occurred to her that she would have really been in trouble if there'd been no food tonight. And it would have been an effort, in her present mood, to do the little chores, like making up the bed.

She made sandwiches and sliced the cake and wiped the fruit.

Back of the kitchen, a trapdoor led to the cellar. She tugged it up and here, where no one had looked, balls of dust went rolling. Peering down the steps, she glimpsed cobwebbed shelves that would eventually be lined, she supposed, with her preserves. At the moment, it was musty and damp. She wondered if many houses here, well-kept and prim on the outside, were like this in the hidden, indoor places.

Tomorrow she would give it a good going-over. She might not feel at home yet, but that would come. Things bubbling in the kitchen would help, smells she knew, and daylight.

There was a small barn at the back for the horse, and an outhouse. Also, there were two large maple trees hanging heavily over the house, and she wondered how much light the kitchen would get. She could see the teacher out at the back, unhitching the horse, pumping water for it. More slowly, she went through the place again. Even lighting oil lamps, she wondered at its darkness.

The trouble was the colors. The walls were painted heavy greens and blues and browns; the linoleum was a brown-and-yellow pattern, dulled and old; the furniture was brown, too, and the baseboards, stairs, banisters, and doors were all dark wood. The place seemed muffled by darkness. It might be better once it was thoroughly cleaned, not merely wiped. She, no doubt, would be better with a meal and a good night's sleep. What was dark, she could brighten.

“Where'd the food come from?” he asked.

“It was here. Someone must have brought it in.”

“Good thing they did.”

After the meal, when she'd washed up, she paused in the doorway to the front room. He was kneeling, boxes of books around him, putting volumes on the shelves. These must be books he'd had in storage and had delivered here. Like the furniture: just here when she arrived.

“I think I'll go up now,” she said shyly.

“That's fine,” he said, not looking up.

She might not have known much, but she knew this was not how bridegrooms behaved. Respect for a new wife and her sensibilities might be one thing; lack of interest quite another. There was an impasse of some kind here. Maybe she only had to apologize, although hard to say for what. She was still awake, wondering, when he appeared.

Frances jokes about “getting laid” — that's one expression for it these days — but perfectly descriptive, Aggie thinks, of his technique, laying her like a plank, hammering her efficiently into place, flattening her down properly.

Then, “Is the bed made up in the other room?”

“No, why?”

“Because I thought I'd sleep there. I have to get a good rest, and I'm used to being on my own. Besides, you know, you snore.” She would have laughed, except it didn't sound as if he meant it to be funny. “I'm sure we'll both sleep better that way.”

She wasn't the only one who snored; she could hear him through the walls. The house, for all its solid appearance, was deceptive that way.

She might be puzzled and unhappy and a little angry, but she got out of bed the next morning and faced the day with a sense of purpose, rolling up the sleeves of her housedress.

Even in daylight, the place was depressing. “Did the furniture come with the house, then?” she asked him at breakfast. He looked surprised, and once more offended.

“Of course not. Why on earth would you think that?”

She shrugged. “I guess because it doesn't look like my idea of new furniture. I'd thought maybe something bright. The place is like a dungeon.”

“It just needs a good cleaning. That's what you'll be doing today, I suppose?”

“Well, that's the first thing.”

From room to room she moved, scrubbing and polishing and waxing and dusting. The place got cleaner, if no lighter, as she got dirtier.

Something was odd about the shelves in the front room. So many books: had he read them all? If so, what did he know? Her fault, perhaps, was contained in one of them. She might be guilty of something she was too ignorant to understand. Little packages of knowledge — like buying a bag of sugar or a pound of shortening, each one containing a certain amount of nutrition or taste or learning. Hungry, she made herself a sandwich in the kitchen and wondered what had struck her as odd. “Oh, for heaven's sake,” she thought, and went to check. Something had been strange, all right: all in alphabetical order.

(“He'd get so angry if I put one back in the wrong place,” she told Frances.)

The downstairs, at least, was clean when he got home. Her hair, however, was hanging in strings, her dress had ripped beneath one arm, and she had lost track of time, so that she was just bringing in a pail of water to wash herself when he arrived. He didn't say anything, although his nose wrinkled. He might at least have mentioned all her work.

(“Your grandfather,” June told Frances, “was a fastidious man.”

(“Fastidious nothing,” Aggie snorted. “He was antiseptic.”)

He didn't appear in her room that night, but went right by to his. She thought of this one now as her room, and that one as his. She was a little surprised at how easily and quickly a person could get used to things. Still. Here she was, in her house, her territory, and her new life. She could hear her mother: “You make your bed and you lie in it.”

“It's still very dark, don't you think?” she suggested in the morning, tentatively. “It might be brightened up a little.”

“Do you think so? I think it's fine.” Head down, staring into his tea as if that were the end of it.

Well, she certainly wasn't going to spend another day sweating away at the place when she would only be shining up the gloom.

It was only a few blocks to the main street. Closer to downtown, if that's what they called it, more houses were frame than brick or stone, and they were smaller and closer together. But there were huge maples lining the streets, and a little cool breeze, and quite a lot of people compared with what she was accustomed to. She couldn't distinguish faces properly, with no names for any of them. She could see, however, that they dressed for shopping, and that she might have worn a hat, at least; it seemed to be the custom.

The grocery store was small and jammed with goods. “Ames Groceteria” said the sign. The plump little woman behind the counter watched as Aggie regarded the shelves. “Is there something I can get you today?”

“Yes, but I'll have to think a minute. Almost everything, I expect. Do you deliver?”

“Certainly. We'll have it to you this afternoon. I don't believe we've met. I'm Mrs. Ames.”

“I'm Mrs. Hendricks.” That sounded ridiculous, someone else entirely. “Aggie,” she amended firmly.

“Of course, you'll be the new teacher's wife.”

“That's right.” Was that what she was to be here? She felt the weight of it. How odd, to have position but not a name; anonymous. Still, she could see what he meant when he'd warned her she'd have a position to maintain here. Different from merely being old Will MacDonald's middle daughter, which she was used to being. And after all, that was just as anonymous.

“So you'll have moved into the old Campbell place,” this Mrs. Ames was saying. She did not offer her own first name, and Aggie wondered if there was a time and place, a length of acquaintanceship, required before real names were given. If so, she had already blundered, giving hers. She could see a day of errors as she fumbled her way into place in this town.

“Is that what it's called?” Would it be the Hendricks place at some point, and how long would it take to make it that?

“Well, they built it, the old folks. They lost a son in the war, and their daughter moved away and now they've gone to live with her and her family and had to sell it up. But, of course, now,” and the woman smiled, “it'll be your place.”

“Yes, it will, won't it?” and Aggie smiled back. It was friendly enough here, or could be; she'd just been frightened for a moment.

“Mind you,” Aggie went on, “there's a few things to be done.”

“Yes, I imagine it would have got a bit run-down. Ab Campbell's been sick the last few years and Beatrice pretty much spent her time looking after him.”