The Ladies' Lending Library (19 page)

Darka is unexpectedly modest, or at least wary, as far as her laundry is concerned. While the washing line strung from the Martyns’ kitchen porch to the flagpole across the lawn is dotted, amongst the bathing suits, shorts and tops, sheets and socks and towels, with several pairs of white cotton panties as large as platters and the inevitable ribbony flag of a brassiere, more foam-rubber padding than anything else, Darka’s undergarments are absent. She was not, she’d decided early on in her stay with the Martyns, going to give those kids any ammunition. She’d anticipated the practical jokes—bras and panties being snitched off
the line, waving from shrubs at the edge of the lawn or decorating the sand dunes. She’d mounted a laundry line in her room, from the curtain rod to the antlers of the one-eyed moose over her bed; she would swish her bra and panties through her bathwater in the evenings, then carry them rolled up in her towel to her room, where she could personally superintend their drying.

There is no lock on any of the doors at the cottage: it is one of Sonia’s rules that doors should be left open; on more than one occasion she’s found occasion to express the belief to Laura that a demand for privacy is tantamount to a confession of guilt. “If it’s not something you can do out in the open—other than changing your clothes or using the bathroom—then it’s something you shouldn’t be doing at all. Especially a girl of your age.” This rule was even more flagrantly enforced for Darka who, being that much older and more developed than Laura, gave all the more cause for alarm.

Tania had thought of involving Laura in their project, reasoning that three heads would be better than two in planning strategy, but Katia had threatened to throw the whole thing over if Laura was included. “She’ll tell on us—or trick us into giving it away. Besides, all she cares about is that stupid Cleopatra.” The extent of Laura’s involvement has been Katia’s borrowing, unbeknownst to her sister, the dog-eared Souvenir Booklet, over the photographs of which, in the cool privacy of the crawl space under the Plotskys’ veranda, the girls have pored. They have appraised the depth of Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavice, noting the beauty spot on her left breast, exposed by the décolletage of her Queen-of-Egypt dresses; they’ve attempted to discern, through the cloudy blue waters of her bath, the shape of the bosom that the water just covers, while dismissing the nineteenth-century engraving of a small-breasted
Cleopatra kneeling before Julius Caesar. In the engraving, she is wearing what looks like the reverse of a brassiere: a contraption of broad leather straps under and around her breasts and over her shoulders, leaving totally bare a surface bland as the frosting on the cakes in Venus Variety, with nipples as ridiculous as maraschino cherries.

One afternoon, when they are supposed to be resting, and when Tania has come over to eat lunch with the Martyns, the girls get their chance. Bonnie and Baby Alix are sound asleep, Laura is off at the Shkurkas’ cottage, Sonia is paying a visit to Auntie Zirka, who has hinted that she’s been neglecting her, and Darka has asked them to keep an eye on things, as she’s got to go to the store for emergency supplies—by which they know she means the sanitary pads that Mrs. Maximoynko keeps behind the counter, dispensing them in brown paper bags to the needy.

They watch Darka disappear down Tunnel Road; they listen at the door where Katia’s little sisters are sleeping, then check from both the kitchen and the front porch to make sure no visitors are coming by, from any direction. And then they turn the handle to the door of Darka’s room, feeling a pleasurable guilt as they tiptoe inside, closing the door softly but firmly behind them.

It’s hot and close, though the window’s open behind the yellow curtain. Sun pours through fabric the colour of raw egg yolk: it bathes the girls, their hands and the objects through which they’re rifling in Darka’s chest of drawers. It doesn’t take long to find what they’re looking for: Darka keeps her bras (she has two, one of which she’s wearing) where you’d expect her to, in the top drawer, next to a pile of underpants shoved in any old how. The only other thing of interest is a photograph lying at the bottom of the drawer, a colour photo of a boy sitting in a fire-red convertible,
with a black-and-white dog in the passenger seat. The boy has a University of Toronto pennant in his hand, and he’s waving at whoever is taking the photograph. On the back appears
Jamie, March 12th, 1963, Toronto, Ont.
in Darka’s stubby handwriting. The boy, Katia decides, is of little interest: it’s the red car and the spotted dog that draw her attention, so that she nearly forgets why they’ve come into Darka’s room in the first place.

“Quick, Katia—come
on,
” Tania hisses, forking out the bra. Together they examine the label.
GOTHIC
, it says. 38C. It doesn’t have foam padding the way their mothers’ bras do; it isn’t soft or clingy at all, but fashioned from harsh, stiff cotton. Even dangling from Tania’s hands like a pair of eyeglasses, the cups jut out into severe triangular points, like miniature pyramids.

“You first,” Katia says.

Tania pulls off her shirt, holding out her arms as if she were a knight donning armour for battle. Impatiently, Katia fastens the hooks, and Tania turns to look at herself in the mirror, both from the back (she bunches up the cups of the bra so that it looks to be a perfect fit) and from the front. This latter view is far less successful: Katia hands her some of Darka’s socks, rolled into tight little balls, and Tania stuffs them into the cups that droop so disconsolately from her chest. It helps, but only moderately so—what Tania sees in the mirror is nothing more than a mutant and unconvincing breed of falsies.

“Here,” Katia says, “put on your shirt—see if that helps.”

Tania buttons the shirt to just above where the bra cups start, then steps back from the mirror and examines herself, in front view and in profile. She puts her hands on her hips, and points one toe; she adjusts one of the cups, in which a sock is starting to come loose from its ball.

“Do you want to have a go?” she asks Katia, who shakes her head. In the yolky light in the small, stuffy room, things have taken on a confusing quality, as if time has suddenly jumped forward. It’s like her father’s home movie projector when a splice comes undone, and the film starts pouring out from the reel, with a stink of burning. What she’s seen in the spotty light of the mirror is not Tania’s reflection but an image of what Tania will be like when she’s grown up, when she stuffs foam rubber instead of socks into her bra. And what she’ll be is nothing more than a version of her mother, full view and profile. They have imagined it so differently; they were going to have adventures, take ocean liners to Shanghai, dig for gold in Siberia: the last thing they would ever do is become their mothers.

“Katia? Are you okay? Then help me get out of this thing.”

They think they hear the screen door slam on the front porch: Katia nearly tears the hooks off the bra trying to undo it. The brassiere is shoved back in the drawer, over the photograph, but the socks lie scattered on the floor where they fell when Tania finally tugged herself free. The girls haven’t noticed: they run wildly out of the room. If they hadn’t imagined the slam, if someone really had been coming home, they would have been caught, red-handed. But all is well: the little ones are still sleeping, Darka and Laura and Sonia are still off on their errands and visits. White faced, hearts pounding, they dash from the cottage. Minutes later, hunkered down behind the sleep-house, they decide that if they’re going to run the kind of risks they just have, they’ll need to get something out of the ordinary at the end of it all. And so they spend the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening devising a strategy for seeing Mrs. Maximoynko’s breasts.

The day after the raid on Darka’s room, the girls abandon the sand dunes behind which they’ve been sunbathing and set off for Venus Variety. Though it’s nearly noon, no one calls after them or is sent to bring them back lest they spoil their appetites; nearly everything happens as easily, as flawlessly as they’d imagined. Having confirmed Mrs. Maximoynko’s presence behind the cash register, and having, to avert suspicion, trailed down the aisles on which all maraschino-cherry-dotted cakes have been replaced by sponge rolls, the girls do not return to the beach when they leave the store with their licorice ropes, but sneak to the back, to the apartment Mrs. Maximoynko has made for herself out of an addition. Tania has a bobby pin at the ready to pick the lock, but the door swings open easily. The girls have an excuse ready if they’re caught: they will say they noticed a smell of burning and rushed in to investigate. After the tarpaper fire, they will say, everyone has to act on even the slightest suspicion.

No excuse is necessary, except, perhaps, on the part of the apartment itself. For it’s such a tiny, dingy space, crammed as it is with an Arborite table and chairs, a fridge and stove and sink, as well as a shower rigged up in a windowless alcove, and a toilet in plain view. What with the bed, the place is so cramped that they can’t imagine how Mrs. Maximoynko manoeuvres in and out; they can’t imagine anyone spending even an hour here. There are a few hooks in the wall, from which hang a dressing gown and nightie; you might have expected a calendar at least, or an ikon, but there’s nothing, just a coat of paint, that robin’s egg blue that Katia always associates with the classrooms in which she’s disgraced herself when asked to recite the tributaries of the Dnipro.

No silks and jewels, no marble bath—none of the trappings of
a Cleopatra. Had they really been expecting them? Katia wonders. But what good are breasts like Mrs. Maximoynko’s if all they get you at the end is a shack stuck on to a variety store, and a husband who wholesales fruit on Augusta? And how are they going to get a look at those breasts if there aren’t any hiding places in Mrs. Maximoynko’s apartment? Their plan had called for them to conceal themselves behind a sofa or anything from which they’d have a vantage point for spying when Mrs. Maximoynko closed the shop, as she always did at noon, and lay down for an hour on her bed. They had seen with their own eyes the tightly closed curtains, lots of times; the real reason to shut those curtains, they had reasoned, was not to shut out the light, but because Mrs. Maximoynko took off her clothes for her noontime nap. Certainly they are sweating, now, in their shorts and halter tops; the shack’s tin roof might as well be a burner turned up all the way to high. Surely she’d at least take off her top, unhook her sweat-soaked bra, towel herself dry?

The girls look at one another, shrug. How Mrs. Maximoynko prepares herself for her hour-long siesta, they are in no position to discover. But now that they’re here, it would be a waste to just walk out the door—it would be weak. Tania nods at Katia, who steps up to the bureau, and prepares to pull open the top drawer, in which, they know, they’ll find a heap of brassieres with cups so big you could fit your whole head into each one. But before the drawer can be opened and a bra pulled out, they have registered what’s standing on top of the bureau, exposed for anyone to see.

If God is looking down at them with his big blue eye from the dome of the summer sky, He has decided to be good to them, this once. Mrs. Maximoynko doesn’t come upon them in the act of trespass, because she’s taking longer than she expected talking
with Mrs. Senchenko about the supplies needed for Saturday’s party. The women are in the store, by the cash register; everyone else is home eating lunch; there’s no one to hear the girls slip out of the shack or catch them stealing away to Tunnel Road and hiding themselves in the undergrowth on the side farthest from the beach. They have forgotten all their mothers’ warnings about poison ivy and non-existent bears; they have plunked themselves down, catching their breath, unable to meet each other’s eyes.

“Could it have happened in the camp?” Tania asks, her voice streaked with bewilderment. She can imagine no other kind of camp but summer camp.

Katia shakes her head, furious. “That’s not the
point.
” Tania waits for her to explain, but there’s nothing more, just the echo of anger that Katia knows to be unfair, but cannot apologize for.

She is more than angry; she is terrified at what she’s suddenly been made to learn. For the secret displayed on Mrs. Maximoynko’s bureau isn’t in the order of a boy with a spotted dog and a university banner, or even a Luger, as Yuri would have liked to find. It is something far more potent, having to do with how cruelly the body can change its shape, and why. For anyone who cares to look, there it is: a card in a frame, a card containing a black-and-white photo of a young woman with a heart-shaped face and widow’s peak; a small woman, needle-thin, hollow-cheeked, her chest caved in. She is standing beside a baby lying on a table, a baby decorated with embroidered cloths and paper flowers, holding a cross in its tiny hands. A dead baby whose skeleton shape no amount of embroidery and flowers can disguise. At the side of the photo is an embossed cross, and words written in Cyrillic, simple words that you could easily spell out:
My Baby Marusia, Died January 12, 1946, Germania.

When the girls finally get to their feet, they brush themselves off, though nothing of the woods is caught in their clothes or hair. They don’t even shake hands as they turn in different directions to walk home, to the cottages where their mothers are waiting lunch for them. Neither girl will be able to eat, whereupon their mothers will scold them for ruining their appetites, as well as for running off from the beach, coming home so late, worrying them half to death. (Unlike Sonia, Sasha will say this in what she calls her Sarah Bernhardt voice; unlike Sasha, Sonia will be as furious at her daughter’s misbehaviour as she is relieved to see her safe and sound.) Of their own free will, the girls will go to their rooms to lie down, without any fuss or complaining. So that Laura scarcely feels any pleasure at being free, for once, to come and go while Katia’s condemned to her room. And condemned as she is, it is Laura, not Katia, who must face the interrogation squad of Darka and Sonia, who confront her after lunch with the news that someone’s been sneaking into Darka’s room, going through her drawers, rearranging things.