The Ladies' Lending Library (9 page)

The ladies look down at their feet in their flip-flops and frayed sneakers. They are all remembering—how can they not?—the party on this very veranda last Saturday night, the get-together hosted by the Plotskys and graced by the Senchenkos. Zirka is exaggerating, as she always does. Peter got a little drunk, that’s all. Everyone had been having a wonderful time, lots of laughing and teasing and more than a little tippling, when suddenly there was a noise like a gunshot: the unmistakable sound of a hand smacking a face. And there had been Peter Metelsky, looking as startled as anyone; he’d been kneeling before Nadia Senchenko, his hand over his heart, his eyes staring up into hers. He’d been reciting some nonsense from
Cleopatra,
pretending he was Marc Antony before Egypt’s beauteous Queen, or some such foolishness. After the slap, he’d gone through the motions of a rejected suitor, his forearm to his brow, his head all hangdog. Vaudeville, pure vaudeville. Everyone had laughed, especially Jack, who’d slapped Peter on the back, and told Nadia he’d find her an agent.
The whole veranda-ful of people had laughed, and shrugged, and relaxed again.

Of course it was nothing to worry about—it was only Peter hamming it up, for old times’ sake. And Nadia, bored with his attentions, maybe a little under the weather, or the least bit sozzled, had let him have it. She’d felt insulted, ridiculed: Nadia’s no Cleopatra, and the one person she bears no resemblance to whatsoever is Elizabeth Taylor, with her violet eyes and double row of eyelashes, and a bosom large and quivery as angel food cake. Everything had settled down, no one had bothered to talk or fuss about it until now, with Zirka determined to make a scene, bang her shoe on the table, force a response of some kind from poor Nadia.

Nadia is still leaning out over the railing, staring at the lake. Slowly, she turns round so that she’s facing them all. She takes off her glasses, and her dark, myopic eyes blink helplessly, unable to focus on any one of the faces before her.

“I was thinking,” she says at last, “about our Labour Day party, our
zabava.
You’ll all be coming, won’t you?”

It is, of course, the perfect response—the only possible reply. And the ladies, who are staring at Nadia as though she were some master-diplomat brokering a peace treaty among half a dozen warring states, fall into line. Of course, they tell her. Of course they’re coming to Nadia and Jack’s
zabava.
Even Zirka nods, biting her lips as if she enjoyed the taste. Who could possibly miss a party
—the
party—at the Senchenkos’ cottage? Nadia slips her glasses back on again and leaves her half-full tumbler on the dented tray before nodding goodbye to Sasha and the rest of them, and walking down to the shore.

The ladies watch her graceful progress until she’s vanished from their sight. Sasha gets up from her chaise longue and throws
her cigarette over the railing. From their vantage point under the latticework, Katia and Tania watch it burn down into the sand.

“Ladies,” Sasha says, in her throaty voice, “the gin’s all gone and our husbands will be home before we know it. I haven’t got a clue whether my kids are where they’re supposed to be, or whether they’ve gone off and got themselves drowned.”

Halia and Stefka, Annie and Sonia, still-smouldering Zirka—they all unpeel themselves from their chairs, rising a little unsteadily. One by one they take their leave, Sonia last, about to hide the fact that she’s still got a glass full of watery gin by spilling it into the bushes off the veranda. Before she can do so, Sasha’s taken the incriminating object from her hands, and Sonia feels more than ever like the youngest in the group, the one who isn’t fully accepted, the tagalong.

“Stay for a minute, will you?” It’s not a request, nor yet an order, but a plea.

“I can’t, Sasha, I’ve got to get the kids to the beach.”

“It’s important, Sonechko. We need to talk. Inside.”

When the veranda stops shuddering over their heads, its planks holding nothing but the shadows of empty chairs, Katia and Tania creep out from under, their legs stiff as dresses ironed till they scorch.

“What do you think is going on?” Tania whispers. “Do you suppose old Maximoynko told on us?”

“So what if she did? We didn’t take anything. She didn’t catch us, did she?”

Tania doesn’t answer. She’s thought of something else, now, some other trouble they could be blamed for. Billy Baziuk on the porch steps, playing with himself. She looks up at Katia, who’s been thinking the same thing.

“It’s not about him,” Katia says. “Nobody saw that but us.”

“How do you know? Maybe his mother did—she’ll say it’s our fault. And our mothers will think we’re just as bad as he is, they always do.”

The girls stare at one another, and shrug. Then they spit into the palms of their right hands and clap those hands together, folding and interlacing their fingers. It’s their ritual of friendship—more than friendship, or even sisterhood. It’s their sign that they’ll remain loyal to each other
till death do us part.
Down in the dark beneath the porch, the Barbies are stuck like scissors in the earth, and the scissors lie forgotten, blades pressed primly together, trying to gleam.

The cottage is as quiet as if Martians had landed and carried everyone away. Sonia’s off at the Plotskys’, Bonnie and Alix are fast asleep; Darka’s slumped on the sofa with a
Hollywood Romance
slipping out from a
Life
magazine. But she’s not reading, and she’s certainly not looking at the bright blue spill of lake through the picture window put in with such labour and at such expense the year before. Perhaps she’s asleep—yes, Laura decides, Darka’s dozing, which is far better than she’d hoped for. As for Katia, who cares where she’s off to as long as she’s not here?

In her parents’ room, on the makeshift vanity table with its faded cotton skirts and rough, plywood top, lies Sonia’s paltry array of makeup. Three tubes of lipstick standing like soldiers in their shiny golden tubes: Pretty Pink, Koral Kiss, Ice Peach. A round container of face powder:
MADAME DUBARRY
under the picture of a lady with a pale satin dress and grey hair puffy as a mushroom. Inside, the powder puff smells the slightest bit sour,
as if it should be left in the sun instead of shut up in a box, in the pale, pink dark. When Laura puts back the lid, a rim of powder sighs onto the table: she picks it up on her fingertips, rubbing it along her nose to make it look longer, finer, as the magazines advise. Her mother doesn’t wear eye makeup—she says it’s cheapening and besides, her eyelashes are naturally dark and thick. No fingernail polish, either. Sonia’s father had made her promise she would never paint her nails; it’s one of the stories each of her daughters but the youngest knows by heart, and Alix will learn it soon enough. How, the morning that Dyeedo Metelsky noticed, on the tips of his daughter’s hands, ten blood-red ovals, he’d brought over a basin of scalding, soapy water, demanding she wash that poison off
immediately
and never even think of painting herself again!

Laura frowns, wishing there was something here she could use to transform herself, something scarlet or gold or inky-black. She can’t bring herself to put Sonia’s lipstick on her mouth; it would be too much like having to kiss her mother in company, showing what an obedient, affectionate child she is. Even if there were any eye makeup she could put on, it would all be hidden by her glasses, and if she were to take off her glasses she wouldn’t be able to see what she looked like in the mirror. Why is she the only one of them all to be short-sighted? Baba Laryssa wore glasses, but that doesn’t help: Sonia always looks at her daughter’s eyes as if Laura had ruined them just to spite her. Why couldn’t Katia have been the one needing to sit closer and closer to the television screen, and to the blackboard at school?

Baba Laryssa’s glasses had had small, thick, rimless lenses: when she took them off, her eyes looked naked and so raw they made Laura think of an onion cut in half. When she’d first seen
Laura in glasses, Baba had told her to take them off as often as she could, so her eye muscles wouldn’t get lazy. But once the lenses had slid over her eyes and the world jumped into sharp, stinging focus, Laura could never be without them. She’d even tried to wear her glasses to sleep, in case there was a fire in the middle of the night, and she needed to see to escape the flames. Now her eyes are so weak she can see next to nothing without her glasses, only blots by day, and blurred circles of light by night. Her mother has perfect vision, and her father has eagle eyes—that’s how he made it through the war, he says: he could see the snipers before they fixed their sights on him.

A fly bumbles against the screen, trying to get out through holes far too small; it’s too stupid to notice the rip farther up, through which it flew in. Too stupid, or else its eyes are bad, like Laura’s. She turns away from the mirror, running her hand over the curved iron footboard of the double bed. How can it be so cool against her palm when this room is so hot, the air so thick and stuffy? She tries to imagine her father lying sleeping here tonight, his body like the prince disguised as a bear in “Snow White and Rose Red.” Once she’d come into her parents’ room when she wasn’t supposed to; had seen her father coming out of the bath, a tall, heavy body with pads of dark fur all over it. She couldn’t imagine how her mother could fall asleep beside a man who looked like a bear. Brown hair on the backs of his hands and springing out of his open shirt; dark brown eyebrows and hair so thick on his head, he’d joke about taking the lawn mower to it. Not bald like Mr. Plotsky, who is always mopping his shiny scalp with a pocket handkerchief, but thick dark hair combed straight back from his forehead.

When she was younger, Laura believed that her father unzipped
his skin every night; that he stepped out of his pelt the way he’d step out of his car coat after shovelling snow. She believed that her mother had some special gown she wore at night, stiff as armour, thin as silk, to keep her from being eaten up by the bear. Laura was very, very stupid once; she knows that now. Sliding open the closet door, not to touch anything, only to look, she drinks in the good, dry smell of the lavender talc her father always buys her mother for Christmas. It’s concentrated, this scent, in the clothes left hanging so sadly on their hangers, as if their only joy lay in hugging Sonia’s skin. The closet, unlike the vanity table, is packed full: shorts, skirts, pedal-pushers and blouses all in bright, cool colours, a garden of flowers hung by their metal stems. Thoughtlessly, Laura pushes farther and farther into the deep, narrow closet, feeling the texture of the cloth: satiny, or nubbly, or gauzy. Until she comes to the very end, to something that feels like nothing else under her fingers. She pulls at it, tugging it past the other clothes till at last she holds it up to her eyes, a long shimmer of gold. The dress Cleopatra wore on her triumphal entry into Rome, bringing her son Caesarion to be crowned.

Gingerly, Laura holds up the dress, her legs in their usual knock-kneed lock. In the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door she confronts her body. It’s an entirely different shape from her mother’s. It’s more, she knows, like a tub of lard than an hourglass, and the collarbones which, on Sonia, project like a pair of budding wings are swallowed up by fat—puppy fat, Laura’s heard her mother call it. So—a dog in a tub of lard, that’s what she looks like, but somehow it doesn’t matter with this dress. There’s no waist to it; the material expands to cover her, seems to melt the thickness of her waist and thighs. If she were to step into it, she would become Cleopatra: everything about
her would change, would turn clear and sharp, the way the world had done when she’d first put on her glasses. Outside, a squirrel starts chittering as she pulls the dress over her head, not even bothering to tug off her shorts and her top, fighting down the panic she always feels when she’s getting dressed, as if the cloth is out to smother her.

It looks all wrong; it looks ridiculous. Because of the bra sewn into the material, foam cups like pointy balloons: if you press them they collapse like those cakes at the store, the ones Katia and Tania spoil by pushing down the maraschino cherries. If she could take out the foam cups, it would fit, it would have to fit; it would be perfect. She tugs the dress back over her head, trying not to panic when the cloth sticks; she grabs the scissors from her mother’s sewing basket under the vanity—the big, clumsy ones, since the smaller set is missing—and presses a steel tip against the tight, white stitching binding the foam to the gold lamé.

Once all the other ladies have gone, and they are on their own inside the Plotskys’ dark, low-ceilinged cabin, Sonia attempts to deflect the urgency of Sasha’s summons. She pre-empts her with a question: Does Sasha think it’s normal, this obsession their daughters have with their bodies? For Tania and Katia are always going on about breasts and bras, right in front of everyone.

“Of course it’s harmless,” Sasha sighs, lighting another cigarette, shaking the match out and exhaling in that actressy way of hers. “If they were boys they’d be comparing the size of their wienies, and seeing who could pee the farthest. I’d much rather have them discussing how big their boobs are going to be than worrying that they don’t have a penis, wouldn’t you?”

Sonia makes no reply—she’s remembering the sight of Darka
in a halter top: at sixteen, the girl has bigger breasts than Sonia’s were when she was breast-feeding. And then she blushes, thinking of how, with all her movie magazines, sixteen-year-old Darka knows more about sex than
she
had known on her wedding day.
Men are like that. Like what? You’ll find out.

“Look,” Sasha declares, “that’s the least of our worries.” She rests her cigarette in one of the asbestos ashtrays Nick or Tania have made in Arts and Crafts at school.

Sonia watches the cigarette burn itself down: though she disapproves of smoking, she also thinks it extravagant, letting all that good tobacco go to waste. Sasha sighs, and Sonia blushes: she’s convinced Sasha can read her thoughts. Sasha-the-Gypsy, the one who knows everything about them all.