The Ladies' Lending Library (5 page)

“Bon-nie Mac-Leod.” Sonia produces the syllables as if they were weights from a pair of kitchen scales: years ago she’d been taught how to pronounce them correctly:
Not
clee-odd,
Sunny, but
clowd,
like those puffy white things up there in the sky.

“What a time you had with Max’s father over that name.” Zirka’s voice is like the reek of an opened bottle of nail polish. “What was it he said? I remember, I was visiting you in maternity, and Mr. Martyniuk came in and shouted—the whole ward could hear him—‘Bony! What kind of name is that? You gonna starve her?’”

“I have a headache, Zirka,” is all that Sonia says. Though she can’t keep herself from remembering what had followed the “Bony” crack: what Zirka, mercifully, hadn’t stayed on to hear. He’d said it right there in the hospital room, her father-in-law. He’d leaned right over her, to where Max was standing, as if he’d meant to grab his son by the shoulders; as if she weren’t there lying in the bed between them, her newborn in her arms. “You gonna let her get away with naming her that?” he’d roared. And then, “Three chances she’s had now and she can’t even give you one son?”

Max had knuckled under, pleading with her to change their child’s name from Bonnie to anything Ukrainian: Oksana or Marusia or Motria, after his mother. But she’d stood her ground. Staring into her baby’s face, the tight-shut lips and buttoned eyes, all she’d been able to think of was Bonnie MacLeod. How forthright and free she’d always been, that friend of her lost life—how stunningly unburdened. That’s what she’d wished for this new child; with her whole heart she’d wished for her the gifts she’d so envied in Bonnie MacLeod.

“Your poor Laryssa,” Zirka was saying. “Of course, she’ll look much prettier without glasses, and if she can manage to lose some weight … It’s so important when you’re at that age to look your best. And children can be so cruel,” she adds smugly.

Sonia doesn’t deign to reply. How dare Zirka say a word about Laura’s size: doesn’t she know that all girls on the verge of puberty put on puppy fat? And Zirka’s one to talk: look at her—look at her youngest; now there’s a fatty in the making! Laura’s chubbiness will melt away, all in good time, isn’t that what she’s been told, over and over? Yet she acts as if it’s her mother’s fault she’s gaining weight, her mother’s fault for making the Jell-O and lemon meringue pie that Laura loves, always first in line for second
helpings, first in line for picking fights, taking offence, being
difficult.
Sonia’s headache stabs in earnest now; she feels the first squirm of nausea. Stretched on her stomach, her cheek nuzzling the blanket, sun beating down on her bare back and long, long legs, Sonia tries to turn Zirka’s words into horseflies buzzing round her, settling on places she can’t reach to swat; letting them drink their fill before they leave her be. It’s not her fault that Laura’s the way she is.

Before she’d emerged from the womb they were already fighting. A breech birth: “You look like a battlefield inside,” the nurse had told her, after the anaesthetic had worn off. Things had gone from bad to worse, Laura biting the nipple with her milk teeth when put to the breast, or else refusing to nurse, so that there’d been endless fussing with a breast pump before Sonia had given up, at last. She’d felt such a failure, her breasts deflating like pricked balloons, Laura throwing up formula in her lap or into a pile of freshly washed diapers. After all the hopes she’d had, with that first pregnancy—this great lump of a Laura with glasses thick as a telephone book, and the fine, limp hair they can do nothing with, in spite of pincurls and home permanents. Perhaps if they dyed it, gave it some body … Maybe Laura would be happier that way—sunnier—with contact lenses and blonde hair. Maybe she’d stop picking fights with Katia, who can’t help being as clever, as pretty as she is, dark and thin and dancing almost before she could walk. While Laura still trips over her own two feet: bandages on her knees, a scowl on her face, and that huge, sharp chip on her shoulder. So much like Marta it’s terrifying.

Max is bringing Marta with him tonight: she’ll be here for a whole week, Sonia groans to herself. Every summer since they bought their cottage at Kalyna Beach, Max has brought his sister
up to stay. Because it’s so hot in the city, he always says. Though, as Sonia’s told her husband once, ten times, a hundred times, it’s Marta’s own fault she nearly boils herself alive: she won’t open the windows for fear of burglars; she refuses to turn on the fan they bought her because it costs money, and besides, how can she complain about the heat if the fan’s turned on? Max is also bringing Marta because he feels guilty, has been made to feel guilt all his life about his only sibling, who plays him like a virtuoso, pulling from him any tune she wants. She’ll complain about the children being too loud, tracking sand into the cottage, which she’ll then insist on sweeping up, though the doctor’s told her it’s bad for her to exert herself. She’ll find fault with the cooking, and the poorness of the children’s Ukrainian. Most of all, she’ll shake her head and mutter darkly about how Sonia’s failed to produce a son:
Girls are useless. It’s the boy that counts.

If she could only let it all go in one ear and out the other, the way her mother had counselled her. Her mother was the only one who could handle Marta—the only one whom Marta had respected, or perhaps, feared enough not to try to lord it over. Why is it her mother who’s dead and not Marta, Marta who’s always off at somebody’s funeral, then phoning to announce that she’ll be the next to go? Why take a woman who loved life so, even the hard life given her; why take someone who was always singing or laughing, or helping out this or that neighbour, and leave that mean, sour rind of a woman instead?

Reluctantly, Sonia turns onto her back, opens her eyes and stares through her dark glasses straight up into God’s blue, blue eye. Zirka puts a hand like a stone on her sister-in-law’s head:

“You really ought to have a hat on. No wonder you get those terrible headaches, lying in the sun like this.”

Sonia sits up, raking her fingers through her hair. Her skin is the colour of brown sugar, her eyes are almost turquoise, Zirka thinks. Her father was Polish, wasn’t he, half Polish? She looks like a Pole, not a Ukrainian.

“It must be nice to have Darka to take the children off your hands,” Zirka goes on. “Especially Alix—though I guess you couldn’t ask for a better baby, so … quiet all the time. And thank heavens Annie Vesiuk is such a strong swimmer—it makes me nervous, all these children in the water, and no lifeguard around. My Yuri has his Junior badge, he can always pitch in if there’s an emergency. And Annie’s boys—it’s incredible, isn’t it—eight boys and all of them champion swimmers. Even the baby’s started and he’s only six months; she has him right in the water with the rest of them. Eight boys! You and Annie should trade recipes, Sonia.”

This time Zirka’s voice makes Sonia think of a sink full of cold, greasy water, the drain choked. “I’m going to check on the girls,” she says, not caring if Zirka thinks her rude for walking off. But instead of struggling to the girls’ encampment at the top of the dunes, Sonia stops halfway, turning her eyes in the direction of the lake, as if looking for a boat on the water, or some distant sign of land: a place where she will feel, at last, guiltless, requited,
home.

“Make sure she keeps her hat on, and don’t you dare let her out of your sight.”

Darka drops the baby into Laura’s lap and makes for the lake; Alix immediately scrambles to Katia. Nearly three, Alix is small for her age, small and thin and even darker than Katia, her eyes and hair black instead of brown. And she holds herself so rigid, it’s like a bundle of sticks falling into your lap when she plunks
herself down, sucking her two front fingers, her black eyes watching everything, everyone. Bonnie hands Alix a plastic shovel to dig with and a small blue sieve. The baby holds the shovel in her hand as if she’s never seen anything like it before, and then, as if to reassure them, as if she were a grown-up joining in a child’s game she only half remembers, pats the shovel against the hot, loose sand. Baby Alix has never said even a single one of these words, though all her sisters were chattering away by the time they were two. Language stays locked in her throat like a safety pin she’s swallowed, but that’s bound to show up, sooner or later, like in an X-ray on the cartoons. Or so their father tells them. There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s perfectly capable of speaking, the doctor says so. If anyone asks about Alix, they are to say that she’s perfectly normal, bright as a button, though it’s never explained what buttons have to do with it. She’s just taking her time, that’s what they’re supposed to say: good things are worth waiting for.

But none of the girls assembled in the little hollow behind the dunes says anything nasty about Alix. If the boys were here it would be different—they would tease the legs off a spider. They are such babies, the girls agree. Any boy older than thirteen is off at the Ukrainian summer camp in Oakville, a camp run along military lines whose discipline, the fathers argue, is good for boys of that age—“that age” meaning old enough to argue with their fathers and be rude to their mothers. At camp they learn to carry messages across enemy lines, to dig trenches and communicate by semaphore—explained to their sisters as something involving flags and cunning. Any boy older than thirteen is at camp, except, of course, for Billy Baziuk, who spends every second of every day and night with his mother. As for the boys at the beach this year, they occupy themselves by hanging round the service station
across the road from Venus Variety, inhaling the sharp smell of gasoline from the pumps, or else diving from a raft anchored at a part of the lake where the sandbars stop and the water’s cold and deep and dangerous.

Today the boys have decided to forgo the diving raft: overnight, a huge driftwood log has rolled up onto the beach. None of them has ever been in a canoe; some have never seen one, unlike their friends at English school who go to summer camps with names like Gitchigoumi and Oconto, learning to identify animal tracks and survive in the bush. So the boys decide to turn their find into a galley instead of a giant canoe; eight of them sit astride the log, paddling furiously out into open water. They’re going to Australia, the huge rock thirty yards offshore, close enough that you can swim back easily if you’ve got your Junior badge. Even so, the mothers take it in turns to pace along the shore, and the girls take no chances, posting spies at the edge of the dunes where they spread their beach towels and sit rubbing baby oil onto their arms and legs, already brown as barbecued duck. The tall, rough grass makes a perfect screen, and the dunes themselves could be the high walls of a Cossack fortress, below which Turks and Tatars lie plotting.

The girls’ talk jumps about like the sand fleas they bury in shallow graves at the edges of their towels. Bonnie, who has just turned nine, is the youngest; Laura the oldest, and Katia and Tania have both turned twelve this summer. As for the others, they take up the slack between Laura and Bonnie. There’s something insistent, authoritative, about this ranking due to birthdate, something Laura’s grateful for, knowing as she does that otherwise they’d never give her the time of day, not only Katia but all the other girls at the beach, except for Bonnie. If Anastasia
Shkurka were here she’d have a natural ally, but Nastia is delicate, prone to sunstroke and heat rash, and her mother keeps her inside in the mornings, when the sun is hottest.

Somehow the conversation turns to Nastia, to how sickly she is, how pale and nervous.

“I don’t think she’s delicate at all,” Tania observes. “I think Nastia Shkurka’s about as delicate as a rubber tire. She hasn’t any guts, that’s all.”

A thrill goes through the group of girls on hearing the word
guts
—it’s a boy’s word, and there’s something daring just in hearing Tania speak it.

“If Nastia woke up one morning with a pimple on her face she’d get a heart attack,” Katia crows. “Nasty Nastia.”

“Shut up.” Laura says this out of loyalty, not because it isn’t true. If Nastia were to grow a pimple she probably would walk round with her chin cupped in her hand, to hide it. She’s always scared to do things her mother wouldn’t like—things her mother would never find out about in a hundred years, like looking at the book Laura found in Sonia’s bedside table, and brought with her once to the Shkurkas’ cottage. “You shut right up,” Laura says, adding a word that’s higher up on the forbidden list than
guts: “Dupo. Smerdiucha dupo.”

The girls shiver. Everyone knows that there’s a war going on between Katia and Laura. Their last fight has acquired mythic status among the girls at Kalyna Beach; everyone’s heard how, that one day it rained, that day of being cooped up indoors with already-thumbed-through books and decks of cards with the queens or aces missing, Katia had started teasing Laura about her weight. Laura had thrown a book at her—a book that had hit not Katia, but the statue their mother had brought up to the cottage and placed on
the mantelpiece, a plaster statue in the shape of a boy and girl kissing under an umbrella. The Martyn children knew the story of that statue by heart: how it was the first luxury Baba Laryssa had ever owned, the first thing she’d ever possessed that couldn’t be worn or eaten. Dyeedo had bought it for her just before he died: it was priceless, their mother claimed. Though if it were such a treasure, why was it up at the cottage? And why had the children heard their father refer to it, when their mother wasn’t around, as “that monstrosity”?

The statue had fallen almost noiselessly; Katia had quickly swept up the pieces with dustpan and brush, but Sonia had known at once. She’d marched in from the screened porch directly to the garbage can, slipped the lid open and, with her bare hands, pulled out the shards of the statue. And then she’d had
highsterics,
as Laura called them. When she’d finally got around to asking which of them was responsible, Katia had yelled “Laura,” and Laura, “Katia.” They had both been punished: made to stay indoors the whole of the next clear, sunny day, with Laura forbidden to visit Nastia, and Katia to run off to Tania’s. As for the statue, its pieces were put in a cardboard box, labelled in Sonia’s uncertain script,
broken statu
, and placed on the shelf beside the screen door, so that every time they went in or out of the kitchen, the girls would see it, and feel appropriately guilty.