The Ladies' Lending Library (16 page)

Such freedom she’d felt on her honeymoon, the reckless joy of being alone with someone: intimately together. Not the sex so much as something tentative and trusting forming inside her. How it had showed itself in the way she’d been able to join in with
Max, keeping it secret from everyone else, this new life starting between them. The teasing, the jokes, the codes they’d worked out to use in front of the waiters and the other guests at the hotel. She’d been stupid enough to take it all for granted, never giving a moment’s thought to whether or for how long it would last. So that when they came back—back to Motria’s endless sighs, and Marta’s sharp, narrow glances, all that buoyant joy had vanished. Locked into the bathroom that first night at her in-laws’ house, they’d splashed and giggled in the tub together, until Max’s father had started banging on the door, bawling them out for wasting hot water. She had frozen, right then and there, as if the bathtub had become a snowfield, and her nakedness were something raw, skinned over with ice.

Last night, when Max had leaned over her, stroking her bare arm shyly, as if they’d never lain together before, that was how cold she’d been. She’d tried to open her arms to him, but they’d felt like laundry frozen to the line. All the words she’d practised saying, all the endearments, every attempt at gentleness in her voice had come out as anger and reproach. About Marta, how he let her bully him, scare his children, and wipe the floor with his wife. And Max had sworn under his breath—how could she blame him?—and fallen back to the lumpy mattress; he’d turned his back against her, abandoning her to the stew of her misery, her helplessness, everything she couldn’t show him, share with him, any more than the drowning can share the air in the lungs of their would-be rescuers.

Sonia’s seen how fast Max drives when he’s angry; she knows how tired he is. Already she hears the knock on the door, sees herself at the hospital, and then the funeral parlour, the white bewildered faces of the children, Marta in her customary black, croaking
ya tobee skazala,
I told you so. How the loving widow,
her lips quivering, will long to throw herself on his body, and how the embittered wife will hold herself back, all the words she could never say to him stuck in her throat, words she’d been made to feel afraid of, ashamed for him to hear, even in the dark. If she could call him back, if it were somehow in her power to make the car turn round and bring him back, she would cover his face with kisses, let him make love to her again and again, and let there be another five or ten or twenty children born, it wouldn’t matter, if only she could bring him safely home.

It is not her imagination, it really is the car, wheels churning up gravel, the door slamming. Max, safe and well, walking up to her. It’s like watching a film in slow motion; there’s all the time in the world for her to see and know what is happening; how the fist of her heart, instead of letting go, clenches even colder and tighter. So she doesn’t throw herself into his arms as she’d longed to only a moment before, when the drive was empty and the car had vanished. She simply sits on the step, looking up at him as he says, “Forgot my briefcase,” and goes inside to pick it up from the coffee table where he left it. And then he’s back again, so quickly the children haven’t had a chance to register his presence; he’s at the car and she forces, has to force, herself to rise and go to him.

“Max,” she calls out. He turns to her, impatient. He’s already in the city, thinking about tomorrow’s cases, that world of his with which she has nothing to do. Instead of
sorry,
or even just
drive safely,
she says, “Don’t speed.”

He gets into the car, slams the door shut. But then she stands by the window until he finally rolls it down.

“What is it now, Sonia?” That weary inflection of his voice. He’s as bad in his way as Marta—why had she ever married him, the both of them?

“I don’t want you dead, that’s all.”

“No such luck.” He starts the car, and then remembers: that is Peter’s line. He isn’t Peter; he refuses to be. And so Max stretches out his hand and puts it on his wife’s cool, slender arm. “It’s only a week and then she’ll be gone. You won’t have to see her here for another year.”

She looks at his hand on her skin: she touches it, lightly, so quickly that he can’t be sure she has made the gesture at all. Her voice when she speaks at last is muffled, as if she’s talking in her sleep.

“It’s okay. You’d better go now.”

This time he drives off for good.

Wherever Chucha Marta goes, even if she’s only moving from her bedroom to the kitchen or from the kitchen to the living room, she always takes her handbag with her. It belongs to her, Bonnie decides, like the scarf she wears on her head, or her underclothes. The handbag is black: it fastens with a shiny gold-coloured clasp attached to a spring; if you were foolish enough to try to open it, your hand would be snapped off clean. This is what Chucha Marta has told each one of them, even Baby Alix, who has shown no signs of wanting to snoop and pry. The clasp on Chucha Marta’s handbag is first cousin to her only other treasured possession: a mink collar made of one long pelt, with small, sorry paws dangling from it, and a fiercely pointed head with brilliant, beady eyes. The mouth of the mink opens like a clothespin to snap shut on its tail: from the start of November straight through to the end of April, Chucha Marta wears the mink collar on her plain black coat, to church and funerals and family gatherings at her brother’s house.

No one can remember a time when she didn’t wear black. Bonnie imagines a small, skinny Chucha Marta—no smaller and skinnier than Marta is now, but aged fifteen instead of fifty-three—getting off the train at Union Station. She’s wearing scratchy black woollen stockings, a black skirt and blouse, and in place of the head scarf, a straw hat with roses round the brim. Young as she is, Bonnie knows a straw hat would never have survived the journeys in farm wagons and crowded trains and steerage berths that her aunt would have suffered through. Yet she has to give her one article of dress less ugly than her standard gear, something as fragile yet detailed as the clothes worn by Bonnie’s cut-out dolls.

What’s in Chucha Marta’s handbag? Secrets, Bonnie thinks. She’s seen her aunt pull all kinds of objects out of the great black bag. Balled-up Kleenexes, a cracked change purse made out of some bashed brown material that tries to look like leather, keys on heavy metal rings. Small, flat boxes of Aspirin for Chucha Marta’s arthritis; tubes of Rolaids (taken copiously and conspicuously after dinners prepared by Bonnie’s mother). Bobby pins and paper clips; small combs with half the teeth missing; even a candle stub and a box of matches. But there’s vast numbers of other things in Chucha Marta’s handbag, secret things that make a rich rattle whenever the bag’s lifted up or shoved down. The bottom of her aunt’s handbag is as Bonnie imagines the seabed to be: littered with treasure from ocean liners like the
Titanic
and the
Andrea Doria,
about the sinking of which Laura’s read to her, from a magazine.

Bonnie is sitting on the sofa in the living room; it is Monday morning, and she’s still in her pyjamas, wrapped up in a cotton blanket. Complaining of a headache, she’s asked her mother if she
could stay up at the cottage rather than go down to the beach—stay with Chucha Marta. Her mother’s face, already creased with the day’s impending complications, tenses.

“Are you sure? Really sure?” She puts her hand on Bonnie’s forehead, checking for fever, calculating the odds of this being scarlatina, since all four of her daughters have already had chicken pox and measles. At last she gives a small sigh and says yes, Bonnie can stay in the living room, as long as she doesn’t make any trouble for Marta; as long as she keeps herself wrapped up and quiet on the sofa. But to Sonia’s astonishment, Marta insists on her sister-in-law going down to the beach with the others. She’s no invalid or idiot child, Marta declares—she doesn’t need to be spied on, kept under observation. No, she will not have that fool of a Darka foisted on her. And yes, she is perfectly capable of keeping an eye on the child.

Heading for the beach, Sonia wonders what kind of game Marta’s playing: halfway down the stairs she’s about to turn back, run inside and rescue Bonnie, when she tells herself that she’s overreacting. She’ll go up to check on them both in an hour’s time.

Marta and Bonnie are alone together, or at least they occupy the same room. For Marta seems oblivious of her niece’s presence. Her eyes are fastened on the piece of crochet work in her hands, work that puzzles Sonia’s daughters—why does Chucha Marta spend so much time making holes out of thread? What do her tablecloths do but show what’s underneath them, what they can’t hope to cover up? Dozens and dozens of tablecloths that Marta makes obsessively, and that Sonia stores unused in a trunk in the basement.

“Chucha Marta?” Bonnie calls from the sofa.

There’s no reply but the tug of thread through the crochet hook.
Bonnie tries again, going over to the chair by the window where her aunt is working.

“What was she called?”

“Who?”

“You know.”

“Why should I tell you? It’s a secret.”

“Please tell me. I promise I won’t let anyone know.”

Chucha Marta puts down her crochet hook and draws her handbag onto her lap. She frowns at Bonnie, and the mole on her forehead doesn’t look like chewing gum any more, but wet and purple, the way you might imagine a bullet hole to be.

“Why do you want to know?” There is no softening of Marta’s voice, no lessening of suspicion. It’s almost as though she’s been expecting the question, inviting it, for the sheer pleasure of denying her niece what she most wants to hear.

“Because I’m sorry that I never knew her,” Bonnie says. “If I know her name, then maybe I can make her up in a story, the way I do our-brother-who-died-before-he-was-born.”

“You’re crazy. You can’t make people up out of nothing. The dead are dead, and they’ll stay dead no matter how much you call them to come back.”

“My brother’s five now. He’s got hair just like Tato’s, and he’s so smart he can read the newspaper already—” Bonnie stops speaking, not because she’s run out of things to say, but because Marta has slapped her face, hard enough to make the skin burn and then go numb. Bonnie has never been hit before.

“Never talk like that to anyone again. That baby’s a secret—he’s not your secret, he’s your mother’s. You keep him in here—.” Marta may be pointing to her heart, but she’s holding up her handbag against her chest and thumping it as if it were her breastbone.

Bonnie doesn’t cry out, and she doesn’t cry, though her face stings and the whole room is shuddering from the force of that slap—the curtains shake on their rods, even the glass in the picture window shivers. She sits there watching Chucha Marta clutch her scarred black handbag to her chest, and then, summoning all her courage, she puts her hand out to the bag and touches it.

“Your sister isn’t a secret, Chucha Marta. Tell me her name.”

For a moment, Bonnie’s afraid that her aunt is going to hit her again, but Marta only grips the handbag tighter before letting it drop to her lap. And then she opens the clasp and plunges into the jumble of things that swim in that dark, sealed sea. She pulls up an ancient peppermint, closes her hand round it, then reluctantly offers it to Bonnie. But the child won’t touch it; she just stands there, waiting. Till Chucha Marta snaps her handbag shut and answers her.

“
Lyalka
,” she says, at last.

Bonnie nods—she knows that word; it means doll. A nickname. Her dead aunt was Chucha Marta’s baby sister, the way Alix is hers. Bonnie’s about to press Chucha Marta about her sister’s real name, her proper name, when Marta speaks again.

“She had your eyes. Brown, with little gold fish swimming in them. And your hair—just that golden red.”

Bonnie nods, trying to keep her mouth from falling open. For Chucha Marta’s voice, as she has spoken these words, is the voice of an utter stranger. It isn’t harsh and shrill any more: it’s hoarse, as if the tenderness in it has grown a rough coat of rust.

“You are too trusting, little one,” Marta whispers in the same hoarse voice. “Someone has to teach you not to trust anyone—not your parents, and not God either.”

When Sonia comes up from the beach to check on them, she
finds Marta crocheting, her back turned to the window overlooking the lake, and Bonnie asleep on the sofa, clutching her blanket high against her face.

Thick as thieves, Sonia moans to Sasha. Her daughter, her beautiful little Bonnie, who has never made trouble for anybody, the one even Laura loves without reservation, is thick as thieves with Chucha Marta.

Sasha pours Sonia a glass of ginger ale with a dollop of gin in it. Sonia is too upset to know how strong her drink is; in fact, Sasha observes, Sonia is as upset as she’s ever seen her. It must have to do, she thinks, with the death of Sonia’s mother: Laryssa was the only one who could handle “the harpy,” as Sasha calls Marta, giving the word a Ukrainian flavour, rolling the
r
’s in a way that usually sets Sonia laughing. But not today.

“She says she pities me for being married—she goes on and on about how stupid I was to ever give myself away! She says I’ve turned Max into a spoiled child. And the girls—she makes it crystal clear what a rotten mother I’ve been—”

“Send her over here, Sonechko, and I’ll set her straight. Can you imagine what she’d say if she saw this house, and my kids? Come on, cheer up: you’ve only got her for a week. Thank your stars you’re not Annie. Can you imagine what it’s been like for her, having her mother-in-law move in with them even before they got back from their honeymoon?”

But Sonia derives no consolation from comparison of her lot with Annie Vesiuk’s. She drinks up her gin and ginger ale and walks foggily back to the cottage, where Darka’s been left in charge while Marta naps. (Sonia hadn’t been able to tell Sasha what Marta’s judgment on Darka had been.) At the steps leading
up to the screened porch—the rotting steps Max has been promising all summer to fix—she stops, listens for any noise of battle inside, and sits down to puzzle out what’s happening. It’s not that Marta’s showing any sign of affection towards Bonnie: it’s just a sense Sonia has of a thickening of the air between them, of something holding them together like the loops of thread in Marta’s crochet work, the webs she spins like the spider she is. And that’s what makes Sonia so uneasy—not the thought of Bonnie as a fly caught in Marta’s web, but of Marta turning the child into another, smaller spider, infected with Marta’s own bitterness.