The Ladies' Lending Library (29 page)

“In spite of everything I knew, in spite of the way it was in the old country, in spite of my parents’ lives, I really believed that once you grew up, you could do whatever you wanted. That only people who were too dull or stupid or frightened to want anything better would end up working at a factory or office, or in a hellhole of a kitchen all summer long.”

Peter’s staring at the floor again, as if his life depends on registering its strips of varnished tongue and groove. “She told me not to be a fool. Didn’t I understand that things got worse instead of better when you grew up? That I would have no time to think of trees and sky and the rest of it, that nobody, nobody was free to do what they wanted. I swore at her, told her that she was the fool, that I’d prove it to her—she would see!”

He stops. There’s nothing more to say, if he’s been saying anything at all. She must have heard his words as if they were being spoken in a language from outer space; she must despise, or worse, pity him. But when, at long last, he looks at her, he sees that she is smiling.

In all the time he has known Nadia, he has never once seen her smile. Not as she is doing now, here, for no reason at all, a smile that turns her face into a piece of paper that’s caught rapid, joyous fire. Something shifts—something in the atmosphere, in the light of the screened-in porch, in Peter’s own heart, which is no longer a soft balloon or a fist-sized stone, but a muscle, pumping out blood, keeping him awake, alive. So that he smiles back, a fine, open smile without a trace of mimicry or mockery, for once.

In some dream vestibule, Jack and Zirka are complaining, pouring out a job lot of disappointments and injuries to a God whose
one blue eye is firmly shut, so that Peter can be alone here with Nadia. As if, eighteen years ago, she had held out her hand to him in that dark auditorium and said,
Yes, Peter, of course I’ll marry you.
As though they were in their own home: a couple whose thoughts and hopes and imaginings are like books that they have read together: known, shared, puzzled through. He is alert now as he’s never been before. He can’t believe how keen his senses are: how much pleasure he’s taking in the rasp of crickets in the bushes round the porch, in the look of black coffee pooled in a stark white cup. He wants to laugh, he wants to sing, he wants to blurt out, as he’d done all those years ago, “Marry me!”

But it’s Nadia who speaks, holding out her hands to him, letting him pull her up from the chair where she is sitting. “Don’t say anything. Just look.” She leads him over to the table, and he immediately sees his mistake. She wasn’t writing, as he’d assumed, but drawing. There’s a pile of sketches that she’s been sorting: he goes through them, taking his time, amazed at how meticulous and yet moving they are. Small sketches of perfectly ordinary things—a pair of spectacles, a glass, a pine tree seen through the minute grid of a screen window. They are drawn expertly, beautifully and so poignantly that he has to bite his lip. He pauses at an unfinished one of an old, crumpled shirt, with a button hanging by a thread.

“You know that Jack took me to New York to see
Cleopatra?
The world premiere, and we were there, along with the movie stars and producers and politicians: Mr. and Mrs. Jack Senchenko! We sat through the whole four hours—and all the way back to our hotel, Jack couldn’t stop talking about that scene where Caesar and Cleopatra visit the tomb of Alexander the Great. Do you remember it?”

She doesn’t wait for Peter’s answer; she rushes on.

“There’s this strange light playing over the tomb, so you can’t tell whether it’s a bas-relief of Alexander that you’re seeing, or the actual body—uncorrupted, like a saint’s. But what Jack kept going on about was Cleopatra—not Elizabeth Taylor—Cleopatra. What a woman she was, and how a man backed by a woman like that could do anything. Could be not just Someone but a Conqueror of the Earth! That was when I finally understood just how hopeless it was, our marriage, what I’d tried to make of it. After all those years—not that he didn’t know who I was, but that he still didn’t want what I was, what I could give him. He thought that all I had to do was to make up my mind to do it: paint up my eyes, put beads in my hair, command his empire with him.

“Instead of which, I do this,” she says, putting out her hand to the sheaf of drawings, just touching them. “They’re nothing much,” she says. And then, “They’re what I am, Peter. They’re all I am.”

This time he doesn’t hesitate, or fumble. He draws her into his arms, and holds her as close as if they were dancing. To the far-off beating of waves at the shore; to the clock ticking on the wall, to their very breathing. Dancing close, slow, their arms pressed tight round one another, as if to keep themselves from drowning.

For as long as there has been a Kalyna Beach, there’s been a
zabava
at the Senchenkos’ cottage on Labour Day weekend. The party starts at eight on Sunday night, once the children have been fed and put to bed, or been left reading comics in their pyjamas in their bedrooms. The parents take turns checking in on them all, cottage by cottage; it’s a regular patrol.

This evening party in cottage country is always as formal an
affair as can be contrived. The men dress up in short-sleeved shirts and neatly ironed Bermuda shorts; the women all wear long, poolside dresses by Sea Queen, though no one’s ever put a toe into the water of the Senchenkos’ swimming pool. Sasha Plotsky usually shows up in something people agree to call “different”: a backless black dress, one year; Italian-designed palazzo pants, another. Sonia Martyn is always admired no matter what she wears, though there are hints that this year, the year of
Cleopatra,
she’ll dazzle them all with something spectacular.

As for the food, there are bowls of pretzels, chips, salted peanuts when you arrive, with wine, beer and soft drinks to wash them down, as well as a bottle or two of Mrs. Maximoynko’s homebrew, which she sells to special customers only. The shelves of Venus Variety are well stocked with Eno and Alka-Seltzer, so she doesn’t do too badly off the Senchenkos’ hospitality, though Mrs. Maximoynko herself would never show up for the party. About midnight, Mrs. Matski, the Senchenkos’ housekeeper, who’s been brought up to the cottage for the occasion, appears with loaded roasters of
holubtsi
and
patychky.
There’s always a sweet table, too, with cherries jubilee and platters of poppyseed strudel baked by Jack’s sister, Zirka, plus tea and coffee and more soft drinks. People start saying their goodbyes well after one in the morning, and the very last hangers-on can be seen weaving over the dunes at three. Jack believes in showing people a good time, but Nadia usually says good night and goes off to bed just past midnight, after the food—none of which she’s been seen to taste—is served.

The Senchenkos’ cottage is a cross between a Swiss chalet and an apartment block. There are those who say Jack should have stuck to his own if he wanted the ethnic touch—a thatched cottage, whitewashed, surrounded by a wooden fence with glass
jars upended on the staves to dry in the sun. Others cluck their tongues over the sheer showiness of a mansion that can sleep a dozen people at a pinch; that has window boxes filled with geraniums, and shutters with hearts cookie-cuttered out of them, while other people make do with construction kits sold at Beaver Lumber. But that’s the way Jack is; he has money and he sees no reason to hide the fact. It’s good for business to show off what you’ve done for yourself, it inspires confidence. Money attracts money. Hence the chalet’s
pièce de résistance:
the swimming pool, the most grandiose, utterly unnecessary item among the chalet’s mod cons and luxury appointments.

People wonder what Nadia thinks of the whole business; they keep on wondering, since Nadia keeps her thoughts to herself. She never objects when, party after party, Jack takes people through the house, pointing out all the new additions, boasting about how much this or that appliance cost, or the price of the baby grand by the picture window. There are some who are fascinated by the fuss Jack makes about price tags, and others who denounce any objections to the show as worthy of the
Anhleetsi,
the Smiths and Joneses with their paralyzing fear of being thought vulgar. Still others keep safely silent, visiting the Senchenkos’ cottage and comparing it with their own houses in the city, hugging to their hearts the thought that you could lug a grand piano into the bush and turn a whole wall into a picture window, but still behave like a farmer at a country fair, showing off your prize pumpkins.

Everyone is preparing for the Senchenkos’ party. Even the few who’ve not been invited, or who have refused their invitations, can think of nothing else. The children are as keyed up as their parents; with the disbanding of the
Zaporozhtsi
after the Billy Baziuk affair, all plans to spy on the grown-ups have been abandoned. The most
the children can hope for is leftovers from the sweet table that will have been pressed on their parents by an affable Jack Senchenko as the party winds down. Leftover cake for breakfast; grumpy adults staggering around with small eyes and hands pressed to their heads and warnings not to make a peep, a single peep: warnings that for once will be heeded.

But that is all in the future: it’s what’s immediately at hand that presses on the Martyn girls—at least, the two oldest. Though they’ve strenuously avoided each other’s company, like armies pitched on opposite sides of a great plain, waiting for the right conditions to attack, they are obsessed with exactly the same dilemma: what to do about their mother’s dress. They can ask no one’s advice on the matter; they come up with no inspired, or even desperate solutions. The dress is still hanging in their mother’s closet, hanging like a murder victim, slashed and soiled and with their fingerprints all over it. The only wonder is that the corpse hasn’t started to smell and give itself away.

They know, Katia and Laura, that this time it won’t work: blaming another for their own misdeeds, or protesting it had all been an accident. What do they fear when, this evening, their mother goes to her closet, reaching for the treasure she’s buried in such perfect confidence of safety? Not that she will take her hairbrush, or a wooden spoon to them; not that they’ll be sent to their rooms, kept indoors, away from the beach, away from their friends. It is, after all, the last weekend of the summer. What the sisters are most afraid of, without being able to think it, to say it in words, is the stomach-churning possibility that blood is thinner than water; that hate is stronger than love.

All the girls—except for Baby Alix and Nastia Shkurka, of course—are lying on their beach towels in the hollow behind the
sand dunes. The towels are much the worse for a whole summer’s wear—some have rips in the eroded terry cloth, but it’s far too late in the season to toss them out and ask for new ones: these will just have to keep on doing. For once, the mothers aren’t encamped nearby: there’s just Mrs. Vesiuk keeping an eye on everyone, a baby on one hip, a toddler pulling at her hand. The other mothers are up at the cottages, already immersed in the sweaty task of packing up. They calculate, Laura and Katia, that Sonia will be far too busy, even with Darka’s help, to bother about the dress right now; they calculate they have another six or even eight hours before their mother discovers she has nothing to wear to the Senchenkos’ party.

All the girls have reason enough to lie limp on their towels, as if they’ve just swum across the lake, or finally dug that vanished tunnel to China. Tania, Vlada, Lenka, Rocky-short-for-Roksolana—they are all of them exhausted, as if a summer’s worth of sun and sand and water, Popsicles bought at Venus Variety and hot dogs eaten out of doors, comic books read and stories listened to, bathing suits pulled carelessly on and struggled out of, had suddenly filled them to overflowing, filled them past moving even an eyelash. Tonight is the Senchenkos’ party, and the last summer’s day at Kalyna Beach: tomorrow is Monday, and might as well be winter. It’s true that they won’t actually have to cram themselves into their parents’ cars, along with their duffle bags and suitcases and coolers packed with leftovers, until the afternoon. Yet they know that Monday morning will be drenched in the sorrow of leaving, shadowed by school, a whole year of bells and drills, homework and spot tests, exams, assemblies, gym class and those awful bloomers with their telltale names chain-stitched across the back. English school, at which,
however much they excel in their studies, they’ll be socially stranded, just different enough not to fit in. And Saturday School means yet another kind of failure, not social, this time, but a failure to do with something there’s no word for in English: with
dukh
—a cross between breath and spirit—the
dukh
of Ukraine they’re expected to breathe in and out, even though they’re living in Canada.

One long, drawn-out day lies between them and the bleak horizon of Monday: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” as Rocky’s mother, who has a religious bent, is fond of quoting. And so the girls stretch out on their towels, pressing their bodies into the heat of the sand below, and soaking up sun as if it were syrup you could never sicken of. Even Katia and Laura, lying as far apart from each other as they can, keeping Bonnie as a buffer between them, let go of their separate bundles of fear, their minds replete with lake sounds and the rub of the wind in the tall, narrow grasses nearby.

The sun is hot, their stomachs are full—the girls in the dunes are on the verge of sleep when, whether out of malice or sheer ill luck, a voice breaks the calm. Perhaps it’s to win back Katia’s confidence, to regain her affection, that Tania drawls, “Anyone want to guess what Nastia Shkurka’s up to right now? I’ll bet she’s putting Band-Aids on her pimples.”

For a moment, there’s silence. Then Laura sighs, taking off her glasses, rubbing them as clean as she can on the edge of her towel and putting them back on again. “I’ve already told you, she doesn’t
get
pimples, you moron. She’s got perfect skin.”

“Purr-fect ski-in,” Tania mocks. “How do you know that, Laura? Have you seen her bare naked or something?”