More in Anger (22 page)

Now she was lying hungover in their bed feeling like hell. She dropped her cigarette into a Heineken bottle. She didn't like Rothman's; they tasted crappy. But she had run out of Player's last night and Gordine had given her these. She could hear Paul grunting in the bathroom. The pig. She reached over to turn the radio up. The stretch made her wince. He had got her a good one last night. They were drinking beer at the end, and Paul didn't like beer. She didn't like beer either, but like the cigarettes, there wasn't anything else so she drank it. That's what you do. You make do with what you've got. Adapt or die. When the bar closed and she wouldn't steal him a bottle of Scotch, he got pissed off. And then it was the same old story. Except perhaps worse than usual.

There was the letter that had come from her mother. The letter asking if she was going to work in a bar all her life. Asking her if she knew where her life was headed. As if her mother had a clue about anything to do with her. Was Vivien truly going to waste her good brain, her opportunities, every chance she had been given? What was the matter with her? What did she want from life? I wash my hands of you, she had said in closing. Thank God, Viv had said.

She had burned the letter—good riddance to bad rubbish—but over the next few nights the questions had remained as she
delivered the trays of drinks and clean ashtrays to tables, brought back empty glasses and bottles, full ashtrays, soiled cocktail napkins, broken stir sticks, cherry stems, orange and lemon rinds, and coins. Tips. As she washed the ashtrays, loaded the dishwasher, filled the cardboard beer cases with empties and stacked them in the back room.

Last night, when she was still working, she'd left the lounge for a pee and, sitting on the toilet, she'd started thinking about how Paul was always there waiting for her at the bar, usually sipping the Scotch she had to buy him with her tips. After the months, no, the years of this, where
was
she going? She had rested her elbows on her thighs and lowered her head onto her hands and watched the water turn yellow. She was sick of it all. Paul didn't know what he was doing any more than she did. He wasn't heading goddam anywhere and neither was she.

She lit another smoke and lay back in bed. University. Took another drag. Her lungs ached. One cigarette after another. One drink after another. She'd started sneaking a Kahlúa cow before work. A Caesar or two during. A Spanish coffee after. Sneaking. Stealing. More bad karma. She never laughed anymore. She never smiled. There was a university in Calgary, three hours away.

She had wanted to be the kind of person who didn't quit, who stuck with things even when they got difficult. Who did not choose a sheltered life over an unsheltered one. She wanted real life. She touched her ribs. A bit too real. So when was that karmic debt she owed to Barry paid, anyway? How much was enough, and how was she supposed to tell? And what were you supposed to do if the end of your life was looking a lot closer than what you actually had in mind? Paul was getting worse.
Bruises, broken ribs, broken nose, black eyes. What kind of love was that?

“You're very late, Vivien.”

“Hi, Mum.” Viv squashed her cigarette out in the ashtray and angrily exhaled. Already her mother was being a bitch. Great. Viv pulled the cuffs on her shirt down over her wrists. She opened the car door and got out, pulling down her shirt and sucking in her gut while saying under her breath, “The five fucking minutes that would have changed the world.”

“You may as well come in,” her mother said, turning towards her house. “You're looking much bigger. Are you getting fat?”

“Thanks,” Viv said, gingerly opening the trunk and lifting out her suitcase.

Her mother stopped, turned and took two steps towards her. For a mindless split second Viv thought she was going to open her arms. Viv stopped breathing.

“Did you hear what I said?” Pearl said. “I
said
, are you getting fat?”

“Yes. Yes, I am. Are you?” Viv pushed past her mother and up the back steps into the house as rudely as she could. Pulled her bag like it was her life through the laundry room and kitchen and down the hall to the spare bedroom, directly across from her mother's. No lock on the door. She closed it. Leaned up against it like they did in movies. Already asking herself why in hell she was here. What was it that she was hoping would happen when
she visited her mother? Rebirth? She laid her suitcase down in front of the door, rammed it in close and opened it. Took out the mickey. Unscrewed the lid and took a belt. Vodka for the faint of heart. Her whole body on red alert.

In the living room, her mother was sitting in her brown chair under the only light, a pole lamp, holding her knitting bag on her lap. “Sit over there,” she said, indicating the couch. “I always sit here, in my special chair.”

“I know,” Viv said. “All right.”

“Your towels are in the bathroom on the counter. Don't use mine.”

Only a small amount of light filtered in through the filthy, big picture window. A giant Douglas fir loomed over the house, and the ground directly outside was laden heavily with dry, fallen needles; the lawn was dead. Heavy of heart, Viv turned back to the room and pushed her hand back and forth across the nub of the couch's grubby blue and beige flowers.

“You could try that tomato juice diet,” Pearl said. “Do you remember what your father did with Bill the Garbageman's wife?
She
was too fat. Your father put her in the hospital and allowed her only tomato juice for ten days.” She paused. “Your father had no use for fat women.” Then she gave Viv one of her looks. Viv dropped her eyes. “He never encouraged me to make pies and cakes. Not that I could have made them anyway. ‘We can do without that sort of thing,' he said.
His
mother, by the way, had a weight problem much of her life. My mother became fat as well. But
I
am not fat and never have been.” She glared at her daughter. “Surely that's
something
in my favour.” Pearl leaned
forward and passed Viv a plate of Dad's cookies. “Will you have a cookie?”

“Thank you.”

“It's very warm weather for a long-sleeved shirt. Do you have to keep doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Fidgeting. Moving your hands back and forth like that across the fabric of the chesterfield. It's annoying.”

“Sorry.”

“You may pour the tea, if you can manage without spilling. I'll take mine clear.”

“Sure.” Viv leaned forward and tipped a dead fly out of her cup and onto the rug.

“What did you just do?”

“Nothing.”

“You did something.”

“No. I didn't.” Viv poured the tea and spilled. Fuck.

“Pass me the sugar and lemon. You'll have to get a cloth from the kitchen to mop that up.”

“I'd figured that out, believe it or not.”

The sugar was hard in the bowl and had to be scraped out. The lemon slices were attractively arranged, but the lemon itself was old and mushy.

“Where are the cookies?” Pearl said.

“What cookies?”

“The
cookies
. Have you eaten them all?”

Shit. Where were they? The plate was empty. Next she'd eat the couch.

“Yes.”

“Well, aren't you the selfish thing.”

“Yes.”

“Vivien, I've already had just about enough of you and you've barely been here an hour. Your behaviour casts a pall over everything. I think you go out of your way to be unpleasant. I really do.”

Viv glared back at her mother. Then she said, “You read me like a book, Mum. Always have.” Then she laced her hands together in her lap and bounced up and down like an idiot. “I do go out of my way to be unpleasant.” She stopped bouncing and looked directly at her mother's knitting bag. The long green needles with the brown ends were sticking out. She breathed in and raised her eyes to her mother's. They hardened. “And I
am
fat, selfish and unpleasant. What
you
may not know, because you know almost nothing about me—is that I also drink too much.” Viv stopped, surprised. She'd never said that before.

“Pooh,” Pearl said. “I'm sure you don't.”

Viv clenched her jaw. How the hell would she know?

“You never believe me. You never have. You have never believed
in
me, either. But do you know what I think? What I
really
think? That it would be better for everyone if I were dead. I don't know why I don't kill myself and put everyone out of their misery.” Viv stared hard at Pearl. Hated it that she was going to whine. “Do you? Mum?”

Pearl laughed. “You always did have a flair for the dramatic, Vivien. Now get up off that substantial posterior of yours and
go out to the kitchen and get some Kleenex and more cookies. I'd like one now, and I don't mind if you have another. One cookie more or less won't make the difference between heaven and hell, now, will it? Then I'd like to take you out for dinner, to celebrate your degree.”

While Pearl dressed, Viv took a Perrier from the refrigerator and filled a tall glass with ice. Her degree, yes. Her degree. She drank deeply. Why did she even give a fuck about what her mother thought? About anything? She didn't. She didn't fucking care. She carried the half-empty glass down the hall to her bedroom and gave it a serious spike. As she left the room, she toasted the pictures of Amethyst on the dresser and walls. Amy in that pretty white formal with the tiny pink roses under the bust and her hair done in loops and satin ribbons for her high school graduation. Amy in mortar and gown graduating from a
good
university when she was twenty-one. Amy in white lace for her wedding. Viv held out her drink and rattled the ice. “To good girls,” she said.

She took her drink and went back down the hall, through the kitchen and outside onto the patio. Night was falling, but the air was still warm. She sat down on the white plastic chaise longue. Her stomach was gurgling, the ice-cold liquid swishing around in her empty belly. It was past seven and she was starving. But she could wait. She was good at waiting, as long as she had a drink and a smoke. Hadn't she got good at waiting thanks to her mother? Good at something. All those times she and Amy had waited and waited for her to come and get them. They had always arrived late for their lessons and then she was late picking
them up, sometimes by more than an hour. And sometimes she never showed up at all. If it wasn't too far, they walked. If not, they just sat there—what else could they do? They sat on the steps of their piano teacher's house peering at the road. They sat at the dinner table with the ballet teacher's family. They stood at the minister's living room window looking out, praying God please God please make her hurry up. Only to each other, in their looks more than in words, had they asked where Mummy was, and why she didn't come. Asked how she could have forgotten them, and why. Poor little kids, she thought now. And then there was Paul, and all the waiting she had done for him. And now here she was again. Waiting. Fucking waiting.

So now she would be cross-eyed driving, but so what? She'd survive if she was meant to. If not, so what. Again and again she drank deeply from the tall, thin glass, pushing the ice cubes back from her lips and teeth with her tongue and sucking the drops of liquid, liking the bite from the vodka and the tap of the glass against her teeth. Going inside and refilling it. She lit a cigarette off the end of the one she had been smoking, ground the butt out with her foot and tossed it into the begonias. She breathed in, filled her lungs with smoke from the new cigarette and held it in like a toke. Felt a wave of something descending. Grey cashmere. Exhaled, closed her eyes, lay back. And waited for her mother, who had been late all her life, not Viv. Barely alive in this ugly deadpan house with its dirty windows, its dusty ledges, its dead flies. Her mother as dried out and sharp as the dead brown pine needles, her mean spirit shrivelled up, rattling around in the bottom of her.

Whenever she was around her mother, she felt herself fill like a tidal bore with anger that gushed up from deep inside. Every time, she felt she might drown, so quickly she found herself thrashing around in it. Angry at the way she had learned to look at the world. With suspicion and mistrust so deep that with every breath she expected betrayal or disappointment. So defensive no one would ever get in without a crowbar or an axe. So fucking, fucking lonely, and a failure at being alone.

“No one's going to fuck with me again,” she had promised as she turned the key in her apartment's lock for the first time. As she unloaded her car, as she lugged the bags of books for her university courses up the stairs. “Fucking never.”

She had escaped, and she was a whole lot smarter now. She was twenty-four and she was together now, as hard as if she'd dipped herself in lacquer, and she didn't need goddam anyone. She was still working in a bar, true, but she was going to university, she was going to get a degree.