More in Anger (30 page)

“Hi, Mum,” Viv said as she approached the cardboard casket. “We're back.” Then she looked at Ruby.

“You lift her head,” said Ruby, “and I'll slip them on.”

But that wasn't easy to do. It was hard to lift Pearl's body because she was stiff, and the box she was lying in was narrow. Her head and torso were all of a piece. Viv willed herself to grip and lift. It was like lifting a fallen statue in order to lay a garland round its neck. She shivered as she held her hard mother against her. Her mother's straight grey hair touched Viv's cheek and it was soft, and she remembered being a little girl, maybe two or three, and being carried down the hall to her bath. She had loved the warmth and softness of this body; she had loved to
rest her head on her mother's soft, full breasts even while she had feared that mouth, and those hands.

Before she went home to Frank and Stella, Viv drove the fifty minutes south of Vancouver to Beresford and parked near the entrance to the abandoned gravel pit, whose gates now hung open and askew. She walked down the abandoned road about fifty yards and then turned left to push through a bank of blackberries that caught on her coat, and in her scalp, and scratched her hands, until she reached what had been their property. Many of the old trees had fallen over, but in spite of so many new ones it was the same place; soon everything around her seemed familiar again, and she thought she detected, in her, in the woods, a kind of mutual remembering, as though these woods were someone she hadn't seen in a long, long time, and she had forgotten what close and intimate friends they once had been.

The creek too was how she remembered it, the same golden and dark brown, now flowing with a familiar winter swiftness. As she stepped towards the water's edge, the pebbles ground and shifted under her feet. Escaping her mother, she had spent hours here with glass preserving jars, catching minnows. Setting the jar down in the shallow water, sitting back on her haunches, and waiting. There she was, she could see her small self there. Waiting. Waiting.

What a theme that had been in her life. Waiting for this, waiting for that. Waiting for her mother. Waiting for Paul. Waiting to be acted upon, not acting until there was no other choice, until
she was teetering between life and death, compelled to choose. For so long feeling powerless to change anything. Until Frank. Until Stella. Hating the past, afraid of the present, blind to the future.

It was like a door had been flung open with her mother's death. Would she cling to the frame? Step back inside where she had been? Or step out into free fall towards who knew what kind of landing after falling falling into the sky? What would her sisters do? Ruby, Laurel, Amy—what would they do? She could predict. And herself? Did she have the guts to step through? Flying or dying. Stella or hell.

She looked across the creek and up to the top of the ravine. The leaves were all off the vine maples; she could see through the trees. There was nothing on the bank but ferns, and above that, empty space. The blue house was gone. All of it was gone. The red chaise longue, the orange and brown carpet in the study, the Danish chairs, the dogs, the horses, the doors, the plate glass windows, her daisy bedspread and curtains—all gone. Nothing but ferns and space and memory.

All those times she had escaped her mother were gone now too. All those times she had dashed like a wild thing out the glass dining room door, slamming it behind her as hard as she could. Heart pounding, she had run towards the ravine with her mother's angry voice chasing after her. She didn't have to look where she ran, and she knew that if she tripped and fell, it would be where the ground was forgiving; it seemed always to be soft where she landed, and she was back up and running in a second. Her feet bumped lightly along the grass of the lawn as though she were about to take flight. She was transformed as she ran
into a gazelle, wild and pretty. Not a millstone. Not a nuisance or a wretch. No: she was a greyhound, a cat, a boy.

And now? Now she was Mummy. Belonged heart and soul to her daughter.

She took the pruning shears from her deep coat pockets and began to cut branches of cedar, fir and hemlock. But she'd left her gloves in the car, and her hands were quickly cold and wet, on top of the blackberry scratches, and she paused from time to time to hold her hands between her thighs to warm them, the metal of the clippers digging into her legs.

When she and her sisters had cleared out their mother's room, it was Viv, not the others, who wanted the old photo albums. The oldest dated back to the 1890s, when Gramma Opal was a girl. On the plane, Viv found herself lingering over Pearl's first album, which started in 1917 with her birth. Viv peered closely at the shots of Pearl as a baby in her mother's arms, and in her carriage, then as a little girl, the little girl who had grown up to become her mother. The straight, bobbed black hair and darkly serious expression. Her small face always worried, and unhappy, never smiling. Her fancy little black and white patent leather button boots. Her child's fur coat and ermine muff.

Frank met her at the front door and brought her suitcase and the bags of branches inside while she paid for the cab. She kissed her husband and took off her mitts, toque, parka, and tossed them on the floor beside the bags. Frank said he would make the tea and light the fire while she went upstairs to see Stella. Her body thrilled with anticipation as she climbed the stairs, then warmed with affection as she peeked in the doorway at her
sleeping child. She quietly came close and kissed Stella as she slept, letting her lips linger on her child's cheek, and a quiver of love ran through her. Gently she lifted Stella's arm, kissed her forearm, her wrist, the crook of her elbow, the palms of her hands. She sat and just watched her. Adored her. “I love you, Stella Bella,” she whispered. Stella, her darling girl. Who had always hugged and tickled, who liked to tease, whose eyes so readily sparkled with good humour. Who forgave all. Who liked to clamber up into her lap as she read to her. Who loved her as deeply and as openly as she loved her. The looks they exchanged, full of trust and knowing.

She lifted her head and looked straight ahead into the dark closet. Had she beamed that same way at her mother? And if she had, how had her mother looked back? Was it always,
always
more in anger than in love? Had she ever, ever just held her close? She stood and sighed in the darkness.

The air downstairs was filled with the smells of the forest. When she had first moved here, she chopped kindling, then laid and lit fires in the small old fireplace Frank had never used. But each time, grey smoke crept out through the walls and into the upstairs; they could smell smoke; their eyes stung. It was not only unpleasant, but potentially dangerous. “Not unlike living with you,” Frank had said.

“Well, it's over now,” Frank said, standing when she came into the room.

“Yes.”

“I think it's safe to say you won't be seeing your mother again any time soon.”

“I sure as hell hope not.”

He lifted the sleek sterling teapot from the table between them. It had been an engagement present sent from Scotland to her grandparents in 1915. And then it had been a wedding gift to her and Frank from her mother. The teapot was slightly squat, slightly square, with an ebony handle and dainty, strong, silver legs. Just as she had fallen in love with her grandmother's cameos and her wedding veil, Viv had fallen in love with the grace and charm of this teapot the moment she had opened the box in which her mother had so carefully packed it. Next it would be Stella's. Everything would be Stella's. No. Not everything.

“Frank?” she said now. “Do you remember the last time we all visited Mum, and how we pushed her wheelchair along the paths in the care home's garden?”

“It was hard pushing through the gravel.”

“Stella was not quite three, and I told her not to pick the flowers, but I told her that she could have the ones that had fallen on the ground. Remember? And then she picked up the dead and dying flowers, all the ones with the bruised petals, the crushed blossoms and broken stems, and she put them all in her grandmother's lap. Remember?”

“I do. That was the last time I saw your mother.” A sleek, hot stream of golden brown tea poured cleanly from the teapot's graceful spout. In the fireplace the fire crackled before it began to roar. Money from the sale of her mother's house had fixed the fireplace.

“Are you sorry?” he asked.

“Sorry?” She felt a twinge of anger. “For what?”

“That she's dead?”

Viv paused. Then she put down her mug and took up the poker and savagely poked the fire. “No. No, I'm not sorry she's dead.” She thrust and jammed the poker between two logs, levering them apart. “I'm glad. I hated her. Almost my whole life, and I am only beginning to realize how heavy it was carting all that around. You never knew what the hell she was going to do, but whatever it was, it was bad and she would win and you knew you would feel bad bad bad forever. You were always doomed and you had to be on guard. Now the struggle is over.

“She was a grown woman, and she should have known better than to treat me—treat all of us—like that. No matter what had happened to her, and who knows what did or when. I was a child, a baby and then a little child, and I couldn't have known better or worse or anything at all. Imagine me and Stella. Imagine treating a child like that, like she treated me. Maybe she shouldn't have had children and patriarchal society conspired against her, blah blah blah. Maybe she shouldn't have had four children, certainly not four daughters, and she should have been an academic or something instead. But she did what she did. And then she took no responsibility. For her actions. Ever. That's what still drives me wild if I think about it. She never once said she was sorry to any of us. For anything.”

Early in the morning, Viv woke up picturing her mother lying cold and hard in her coffin. She thought about how she and her sisters had come out of that body, how each soft new baby had emerged and been held against that breast. What would her legacy be to Stella? Nothing like the one she had received, please God. If she could remain alert, awake to the signs. Please God. She moved away from Frank's warm body and got out of bed.
Dawn was coming. She went over to the window. It was icy on the inside, and it wouldn't open. At least not yet. She went downstairs and into her office.

The old photo albums were on her desk. As she turned pages, passing through time, she thought about her mother. She thought about responsibility and how you had to take it. You had to own up when you screwed up, you had to say you were sorry, maybe over and over and over again, and you had to keep trying. What else could you possibly do and still stand yourself? What else could you possibly do and be a mother? It wasn't about denying or blaming or pretending what you did wasn't so bad. Even if you believed you weren't so bad, when you looked into the faces of people you loved and saw the injury, the pain, the suffering you put there, that you inflicted, no matter how it happened, how could you not acknowledge it, how could you not say you were sorry?

On the wall beside her desk, in an ornate silver frame, hung her grandparents' wedding portrait. Opal's eyes were lifted slightly, marriage ahead of her, promising her, she thought, a happy and prosperous future. How could it be otherwise? And he, Grandpa Mac, he looked hopeful too.

Beside the portrait, the wedding veil hung on a peg. It had been stored in a worn-out Woodward's dress box on a shelf in Pearl's spare room until Laurel had asked to borrow it for her second wedding. When Laurel had tried to wash it, the netting had disintegrated. Pearl had become so angry she said she was going to throw it out, and Viv asked for it. At home in Saskatoon she had gently lifted the veil, a flattened, tattered ball, from the battered box, held it first over a kettle then draped it above an
electric frying pan filled with water and turned up on high. All of the wrinkles fell out, revealing vestiges of the veil's former beauty, and even the squashed faux orange blossoms revived somewhat. But the veil as a whole was beyond repair.

In the early morning light, Stella padded into the room and began climbing Viv's leg to get into her lap. “Hi, Mummy,” she said.

“Hi, Bella Stella,” said Viv. She helped Stella up, wrapped her arms around her and held her close. “I'm glad to see you,” she said, and kissed her.

“You're squishing me, Mummy,” said Stella, wriggling to get more room, then turning around in her lap like a puppy getting comfortable and settling down. Viv kissed her head, smelled her hair, and together they turned gently back and forth in her office chair. Happy, smiling, Stella stretched out and pointed one little bare foot. It reached and then caught in Opal's wedding veil and then the veil too swung with them, swung prettily back and forth.

Acknowledgements

Dave Carpenter

Joan Crate

Connie Gault

Carolynn Hoy