Runaway (10 page)

But she cannot get started. And he will report on her, no matter what.

They are following narrow, winding back roads, past a few houses. Every time they go by a driveway without turning in, there is a feeling of reprieve.

“Well, here’s a surprise,” the driver says, and now they do turn in. “Where’s everybody gone? Half a dozen cars when I drove past an hour ago. Even his truck’s gone. Party over. Sorry—I shouldn’t’ve said that.”

“If there’s nobody here,” Juliet says eagerly, “I could just go back down.”

“Oh, somebody’s here, don’t worry about that. Ailo’s here. There’s her bike. You ever meet Ailo? You know, she’s the one took care of things?” He is out and opening her door.

As soon as Juliet steps out, a large yellow dog comes bounding and barking, and a woman calls from the porch of the house.

“Aw go on, Pet,” the driver says, pocketing the fare and getting quickly back into the car.

“Shut up. Shut up, Pet. Settle down. She won’t hurt you,” the woman calls. “She’s just a pup.”

Pet’s being a pup, Juliet thinks, would not make her any less likely to knock you down. And now a small reddish-brown dog arrives to join in the commotion. The woman comes down the steps, yelling, “Pet. Corky. You behave. If they think you are scared of them they will just get after you the worse.”

Her
just
sounds something like
chust
.

“I’m not scared,” says Juliet, jumping back when the yellow dog’s nose roughly rubs her arm.

“Come on in, then. Shut up, the two of you, or I will knock your heads. Did you get the day mixed up for the funeral?”

Juliet shakes her head as if to say that she is sorry. She introduces herself.

“Well, it is too bad. I am Ailo.” They shake hands.

Ailo is a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a thick but not flabby body, and yellowish-white hair loose over her shoulders. Her voice is strong and insistent, with some rich production of sounds in the throat. A German, Dutch, Scandinavian accent?

“You better sit down here in the kitchen. Everything is in a mess. I will get you some coffee.”

The kitchen is bright, with a skylight in the high, sloping ceiling. Dishes and glasses and pots are piled everywhere. Pet and Corky have followed Ailo meekly into the kitchen, and have started to lap out whatever is in the roasting pan that she has set down on the floor.

Beyond the kitchen, up two broad steps, there is a shaded, cavernous sort of living room, with large cushions flung about on the floor.

Ailo pulls out a chair at the table. “Now sit down. You sit down here and have some coffee and some food.”

“I’m fine without,” says Juliet.

“No. There is the coffee I have just made, I will drink mine while I work. And there are so much things left over to eat.”

She sets before Juliet, with the coffee, a piece of pie—bright green, covered with some shrunken meringue.

“Lime Jell-O,” she says, withholding approval. “Maybe it tastes all right, though. Or there is rhubarb?”

Juliet says, “Fine.”

“So much mess here. I clean up after the wake, I get it all settled. Then the funeral. Now after the funeral I have to clean up all over again.”

Her voice is full of sturdy grievance. Juliet feels obliged to say, “When I finish this I can help you.”

“No. I don’t think so,” Ailo says. “I know everything.” She is moving around not swiftly but purposefully and effectively. (Such women never want your help. They can tell what you’re like.) She continues drying the glasses and plates and cutlery, putting what she has dried away in cupboards and drawers. Then scraping the pots and pans—including the one she retrieves from the dogs—submerging them in fresh soapy water, scrubbing the surfaces of the table and the counters, wringing the dishcloths as if they were chickens’ necks. And speaking to Juliet, with pauses.

“You are a friend of Ann? You know her from before?”

“No.”

“No. I think you don’t. You are too young. So why do you want to come to her funeral?”

“I didn’t,” says Juliet. “I didn’t know. I just came by to visit.” She tries to sound as if this was a whim of hers, as if she had lots of friends and wandered about making casual visits.

With singular fine energy and defiance Ailo polishes a pot, as she chooses not to reply to this. She lets Juliet wait through several more pots before she speaks.

“You come to visit Eric. You found the right house. Eric lives here.”

“You don’t live here, do you?” says Juliet, as if this might change the subject.

“No. I do not live here. I live down the hill, with my hussband.” The word
hussband
carries a weight, of pride and reproach.

Without asking, Ailo fills up Juliet’s coffee cup, then her own. She brings a piece of pie for herself. It has a rosy layer on the bottom and a creamy layer on top.

“Rhubarb cusstart. It has to be eaten or it will go bad. I do not need it, but I eat it anyway. Maybe I get you a piece?”

“No. Thank you.”

“Now. Eric has gone. He will not be back tonight. I do not think so. He has gone to Christa’s place. Do you know Christa?”

Juliet tightly shakes her head.

“Here we all live so that we know the other people’s situations. We know well. I do not know what it is like where you live. In Vancouver?” (Juliet nods.) “In a city. It is not the same. For Eric to be so good to look after his wife he must need help, do you see? I am one to help him.”

Quite unwisely Juliet says, “But do you not get paid?”

“Certain I am paid. But it is more than a job. Also the other kind of help from a woman, he needs that. Do you understand what I am saying? Not a woman with a hussband, I do not believe in that, it is not nice, that is a way to have fights. First Eric had Sandra, then she has moved away and he has Christa. There was a little while both Christa and Sandra, but they were good friends, it was all right. But Sandra has her kids, she wants to move away to bigger schools. Christa is an artist. She makes things out of wood that you find on the beach. What is it you call that wood?”

“Driftwood,” says Juliet unwillingly. She is paralyzed by disappointment, by shame.

“That is it. She takes them to places and they sell them for her. Big things. Animals and birds but not realist. Not realist?”

“Not realistic?”

“Yes. Yes. She has never had any children. I don’t think she will want to be moving away. Eric has told you this? Would you like more coffee? There is still some in the pot.”

“No. No thanks. No he hasn’t.”

“So. Now I have told you. If you have finish I will take the cup to wash.”

She detours to nudge with her shoe the yellow dog lying on the other side of the refrigerator.

“You got to get up. Lazy girl. Soon we are going home.

“There is a bus goes back to Vancouver, it goes through at ten after eight,” she says, busy at the sink with her back to the room. “You can come home with me and when it is time my hussband will drive you. You can eat with us. I ride my bike, I ride slow so you can keep up. It is not far.”

The immediate future seems set in place so firmly that Juliet gets up without a thought, looks around for her bag. Then she sits down again, but in another chair. This new view of the kitchen seems to give her resolve.

“I think I’ll stay here,” she says.

“Here?”

“I don’t have anything much to carry. I’ll walk to the bus.”

“How will you know your way? It is a mile.”

“That’s not far.” Juliet wonders about knowing the way, but thinks that, after all, you just have to head downhill.

“He is not coming back, you know,” says Ailo. “Not tonight.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Ailo gives a massive, perhaps disdainful, shrug.

“Get up, Pet. Up.” Over her shoulder she says, “Corky stays here. Do you want her in or out?”

“I guess out.”

“I will tie her up, then, so she cannot follow. She may not want to stay with a stranger.”

Juliet says nothing.

“The door locks when we go out. You see? So if you go out and want to come back in, you have to press this. But when you leave you don’t press. It will be locked. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“We did not use to bother locking here, but now there are too many strangers.”

After they had been looking at the stars, the train had stopped for a while in Winnipeg. They got out and walked in a wind so cold that it was painful for them to breathe, let alone speak. When they boarded the train again they sat in the lounge and he ordered brandy.

“Warm us up and put you to sleep,” he said.

He was not going to sleep. He would sit up until he got off at Regina, some time towards morning.

Most of the berths were already made up, the dark-green curtains narrowing the aisles, when he walked her back to her car. All the cars had names, and the name of hers was Miramichi.

“This is it,” she whispered, in the space between the cars, his hand already pushing the door for her.

“Say good-bye here, then.” He withdrew his hand, and they balanced themselves against the jolting so that he could kiss her thoroughly. When that was finished he did not let go, but held her and stroked her back, and then began to kiss her all over her face.

But she pulled away, she said urgently, “I’m a virgin.”

“Yes, yes.” He laughed, and kissed her neck, then released her and pushed the door open in front of her. They walked down the aisle till she located her own berth. She flattened herself against the curtain, turning, and rather expecting him to kiss her again or touch her, but he slid by almost as if they had met by accident.

How stupid, how disastrous. Afraid, of course, that his stroking hand would go farther down and reach the knot she had made securing the pad to the belt. If she had been the sort of girl who could rely on tampons this need never have happened.

And why
virgin?
When she had gone to such unpleasant lengths, in Willis Park, to insure that such a condition would not be an impediment? She must have been thinking of what she would tell him—she would never be able to tell him that she was menstruating—in the event that he hoped to carry things further. How could he have had plans like that, anyway? How? Where? In her berth, with so little room and all the other passengers very likely still awake around them? Standing up, swaying back and forth, pressed against a door, which anybody could come along and open, in that precarious space between the cars?

So now he could tell someone how he listened all evening to this fool girl showing off what she knew about Greek mythology, and in the end—when he finally kissed her good night, to get rid of her—she started screaming that she was a virgin.

He had not seemed the sort of man to do that, to talk like that, but she could not help imagining it.

She lay awake far into the night, but had fallen asleep when the train stopped at Regina.

Left alone, Juliet could explore the house. But she does no such thing. It is twenty minutes, at least, before she can be rid of the presence of Ailo. Not that she is afraid that Ailo might come back to check up on her, or to get something she has forgotten. Ailo is not the sort of person who forgets things, even at the end of a strenuous day. And if she had thought Juliet would steal anything, she would simply have kicked her out.

She is, however, the sort of woman who lays claim to space, particularly to kitchen space. Everything within Juliet’s gaze speaks of Ailo’s occupation, from the potted plants (herbs?) on the windowsill to the chopping block to the polished linoleum.

And when she has managed to push Ailo back, not out of the room but perhaps back beside the old-fashioned refrigerator, Juliet comes up against Christa. Eric has a woman. Of course he has. Christa. Juliet sees a younger, a more seductive Ailo. Wide hips, strong arms, long hair—all blond with no white—breasts bobbing frankly under a loose shirt. The same aggressive—and in Christa, sexy—lack of chic. The same relishing way of chewing up and then spitting out her words.

Two other women come into her mind. Briseis and Chryseis. Those playmates of Achilles and Agamemnon. Each of them described as being “of the lovely cheeks.” When the professor read that word (which she could not now remember), his forehead had gone quite pink and he seemed to be suppressing a giggle. For that moment, Juliet despised him.

So if Christa turns out to be a rougher, more northerly version of Briseis/Chryseis, will Juliet be able to start despising Eric as well?

But how will she ever know, if she walks down to the highway and gets on the bus?

The fact is that she never intended to get on that bus. So it seems. With Ailo out of the way, it is easier to discover her own
intentions. She gets up at last and makes more coffee, then pours it into a mug, not one of the cups that Ailo has put out.

She is too keyed up to be hungry, but she examines the bottles on the counter, which people must have brought for the wake. Cherry brandy, peach schnapps, Tia Maria, sweet vermouth. These bottles have been opened but the contents have not proved popular. The serious drinking has been done from the empty bottles ranged by Ailo beside the door. Gin and whisky, beer and wine.