The Love of a Good Woman (28 page)

People waiting to meet passengers were not supposed to get in here, but they did anyway, slipping through the automatic doors. In the crowd on the other side of the baggage carousel Karin spotted her mother, Rosemary, who had not yet seen her. Rosemary was wearing a long dark-blue dress with gold and orange moons on it and had her hair freshly dyed, very black, piled up in a toppling bird’s nest on top of her head. She looked older than she did in Karin’s memory, and a little forlorn. Karin’s glance swept past her—looking for Derek. Derek was easy to find in a crowd because of his height and his shining forehead and his pale, wavy, shoulder-length hair. Also because of his bright steady eyes and satirical mouth, and his ability to stay still. Not like Rosemary, who was twitching and stretching and staring about now in a dazed, discouraged way.

Derek wasn’t standing behind Rosemary, and he wasn’t anywhere nearby. Unless he had gone to the men’s room, he wasn’t there.

Karin removed the cigarette holder and pushed the beret back on her head. If Derek wasn’t there, the joke lost its point. Playing a joke like that on Rosemary would just turn into confusion—when Rosemary looked confused enough, bereft enough, already.

“Y
OU’RE
wearing lip-stick,” Rosemary said, wet eyed and dazzled. She wrapped Karin in her winglike sleeves and her smell of cocoa butter. “Don’t tell me your father lets you wear lipstick.”

“I was going to fool you,” Karin said. “Where’s Derek?”

“Not here,” said Rosemary.

Karin spotted her suitcase on the carousel; she ducked and eeled her way between bodies and dragged it off. Rosemary tried to help her carry it, but Karin said, “Okay. Okay.” They pushed through to the exit doors and past all the waiting people who had not had the nerve or the patience to push inside. They did not speak until they were out in the hot night air and moving towards the parking lot. Then Karin said, “What’s the matter—you two having one of your squalls?”

“Squall” was the name Rosemary and Derek themselves used to describe their fights, which were blamed on the difficulties of working together on Derek’s book.

Rosemary said with dire serenity, “We aren’t seeing each other anymore. We aren’t working together.”

“Really?” said Karin. “You mean you’ve broken up?”

“If people like us can break up,” Rosemary said.

T
HE
lights of cars were still pouring down every road into the city, and at the same time pouring out of it, around the big curving overpasses and in streams underneath them. There was no air-conditioning in Rosemary’s car—not because she couldn’t afford it, but because she did not believe in it—and so the windows had to be open, letting the traffic noise rush in like a river on the gassy air. Rosemary hated driving around Toronto. When she came to the city once a week to see the publisher she worked for, she made the trip on a bus, and at other times she usually had Derek drive her. Karin kept quiet while they got off the airport highway and drove east on 401, and turned, after eighty or so miles of her mother’s jumpy concentration, onto the secondary highway that would take them nearly to where Rosemary lived.

“So has Derek gone away?” Karin said, then “Has he gone off on a trip?”

“Not that I know of,” Rosemary said. “But then I wouldn’t know.”

“How about Ann? Is she still there?”

“Probably,” said Rosemary. “She never goes anywhere.”

“Did he take his stuff and all?”

Derek had brought more things to Rosemary’s trailer than were strictly necessary for the work on his bundles of manuscripts. Books, of course—not just the books that had to be referred to but books and magazines to read during breaks in the work, when he might lie down on Rosemary’s bed. Records to listen to. Clothes, boots to wear if he decided to hike back into the bush, pills for stomach troubles or headaches, even the tools and lumber with which he built a gazebo. His shaving things were in the bathroom, also a toothbrush and his special toothpaste for sensitive gums. His coffee grinder was on the kitchen counter. (A newer, fancier one that Ann had bought sat on the counter of the kitchen in what was still his house.)

“All cleared out,” said Rosemary. She pulled into the lot of a doughnut shop that was still open, on the edge of the first town on this highway.

“Coffee to keep me alive,” she said.

Usually when they stopped at this place Karin stayed with Derek in the car. He wouldn’t drink such coffee. “Your mother is addicted to places like this because of her awful childhood,” he said. He didn’t mean that Rosemary had been taken to places like this but that she had been forbidden to go into them, just as she had been forbidden all fried or sugary food, and kept to a diet of vegetables and slimy porridge. Not because her parents were poor—they were rich—but because they were food fanatics before their time. Derek had known Rosemary only a short while—compared,
say, to the years that Karin’s father, Ted, had known her—but he spoke more readily than Ted ever would about her early life and divulged details about it, such as the ritual of weekly enemas, that Rosemary’s own stories left out.

Never, never, in her school-year life, her life with Ted and Grace, would Karin find herself in a place with this horrid smell of scorched sugar and grease and cigarette smoke and rank coffee. But Rosemary’s eyes ranged with pleasure over the selection of doughnuts with cream (spelled “crème”) and jelly filling, with butterscotch and chocolate icing, the crullers and éclairs, and dutchies and filled croissants and monster cookies. She saw no reason for rejecting any of this, except perhaps the fear of getting fat, and she could never believe that such food was not just what everybody was craving.

At the counter—where you were not supposed to sit for more than twenty minutes, according to the sign—were two very fat women with massive curly hairdos, and between them a thin boyish-looking but wrinkled man, who was talking fast and seemed to be telling them jokes. While the women were shaking their heads and laughing, and Rosemary was picking out her almond croissant, he gave Karin a wink that was lewd and conspiratorial. It made her realize that she was still wearing lipstick. “Can’t resist, eh?” he said to Rosemary, and she laughed, taking this for country friendliness.

“Never can,” she said. “You’re sure?” she said to Karin. “Not a thing?”

“Little girl watching her figure?” that wrinkled man said.

T
HERE
was hardly any traffic north of this town. The air had turned cooler and smelled swampy. The frogs were making such a loud noise in some places that you could hear them over the noise of the car. This two-lane highway wound past stands of black
evergreens and the softer darkness of small juniper-spotted fields, farms going back to the bush. Then on a curve the headlights lit up the first jumble of rocks, some of them glittery pink and gray and some a dried-blood red. Soon this was happening more and more often, and in places the rocks, instead of being jumbled and jammed together, were laid as if by hand in thick or thin layers, and these were gray or greenish white. Limestone, Karin remembered. Limestone bedrock, alternating here with the rocks of the Precambrian Shield. Derek had taught her about that. Derek said that he wished he had been a geologist because he loved rocks. But he wouldn’t have loved making money for mining companies. And history drew him too—it was an odd combination. History for the indoor man, geology for the outdoor man, he said, with a solemnity that told her he was making a joke of himself.

What Karin wanted to get rid of now—she wished it would just flow out of the car windows on the rush of midnight air—was her feeling of squeamishness and superiority. About the almond croissant, the bad coffee that Rosemary was sipping almost surreptitiously, and the man at the counter, and even about Rosemary’s youthful hippielike dress and the messy heap of hair. Also she’d like to get rid of her own missing of Derek, the sense that there was space to fill, and a thinning out of possibility. She said out loud, “I’m glad, I’m glad he’s gone.”

Rosemary said, “Are you really?”

“You’ll be happier,” Karin said.

“Yes,” said Rosemary. “I’m getting my self-respect back. You know you don’t realize how much you’ve lost of your self-respect and how much you miss it till you start getting it back. I want you and me to have a really good summer. We could go on little trips, even. I don’t mind driving where it isn’t hairy. We could go hiking back in the bush where Derek took you. I’d like to do that.”

Karin said, “Yeah,” though she wasn’t at all sure that without
Derek they wouldn’t get lost. Her thoughts were not really on hiking but on a scene last summer. Rosemary on the bed, rolled up in a quilt, weeping, stuffing handfuls of the quilt and the pillow into her mouth, biting on them in a rage of grief, and Derek sitting at the table where they worked, reading a page of the manuscript. “Can you do anything to quiet your mother?” he said.

Karin said, “She wants you.”

“I can’t cope with her when she’s like this,” said Derek. He laid down the page he’d finished and picked up another. Between pages he looked up at Karin, with a long-suffering grimace. He looked worn out, old and haggard. He said, “I can’t stand it. I’m sorry.”

So Karin went into the bedroom and stroked Rosemary’s back, and Rosemary too said that she was sorry. “What’s Derek doing?” she said.

“Sitting in the kitchen,” said Karin. She didn’t like to say “reading.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I should go in and talk to you.”

“Oh, Karin. I’m so ashamed.”

What had happened to start such a row? Calmed down and cleaned up, Rosemary always said it was the work, disagreements they had about the work. “Then why don’t you quit working on his book?” Karin said. “You’ve got all your other stuff to do.” Rosemary edited manuscripts—that was how she had met Derek. Not because he had submitted his book to the publisher she worked for—he hadn’t done so yet—but because she knew a friend of his and the friend had said, “I know a woman who could be a help to you.” And in a little while Rosemary had moved to the country and into the trailer that was not far from his house, so that she could be closer to him to do this work. At first she kept her apartment in Toronto, but then she let it go, because she was
spending more and more time in the trailer. She still did other work but not so much of it, and she managed her one workday a week in Toronto by leaving at six o’clock in the morning and getting home after eleven at night.

“What’s this book about?” Ted had said to Karin.

Karin said, “It’s sort of about the explorer La Salle and the Indians.”

“Is this guy a historian? Does he teach at a university?”

Karin didn’t know. Derek had done a lot of things—he had worked as a photographer; he had worked in a mine and as a surveyor; but as far as his teaching went she thought it had been in a high school. Ann spoke of his work as being “outside the system.”

Ted himself taught at a university. He was an economist.

She didn’t, of course, tell Ted or Grace about the grief brought on, apparently, by disagreements about the book. Rosemary blamed herself. It’s the tension, she said. Sometimes she said it was the menopause. Karin had heard her say to Derek, “Forgive me,” and Derek had said, “Nothing to forgive,” in a voice of cool satisfaction.

At this Rosemary had left the room. They did not hear her start to weep again, but they kept waiting for it. Derek looked hard into Karin’s eyes—he made a comical face of distress and bewilderment.

So what did I do this time?

“She’s very sensitive,” said Karin. Her voice was full of shame. Was this because of Rosemary’s behavior? Or because Derek seemed to be including her—Karin—in some feeling of satisfaction, of despising, that went far beyond this moment. And because she could not help but feel honored.

Sometimes she just got out. She went up the road to see Ann, and Ann always seemed glad that she had come. She never asked Karin why, but if Karin said, “They’re having a stupid fight,” or—later on, when they’d come up with the special word—
“They’re having one of their squalls,” she never seemed surprised or displeased. “Derek is very exacting,” she might say, or “Well, I expect they’ll work it out.” But if Karin tried to go further, saying “Rosemary’s crying,” Ann would say, “There’s some things I just think it’s better not to talk about, don’t you?”

But there were other things she would listen to, though sometimes with a smile of reservation. Ann was a sweet-looking, rounded woman with light-gray hair cut in bangs and falling loose over her shoulders. When she talked she often blinked, and didn’t quite meet your eyes (Rosemary said that this was nerves). Also her lips—Ann’s lips—were so thin they almost disappeared when she smiled, always with her mouth closed, in a way of holding something back.

“You know how Rosemary met Ted?” said Karin. “It was at the bus stop in the rain and she was putting on lipstick.” Then she had to backtrack and explain that Rosemary had to put on her lipstick at the bus stop because her parents didn’t know she wore it—lipstick being forbidden by their religion, as well as movies, high heels, dancing, sugar, coffee, and alcohol and cigarettes, it goes without saying. Rosemary was in her first year of college and did not want to look like a religious geek. Ted was a teaching assistant.

“But they already knew who each other were,” Karin said, and explained about their living on the same street. Ted in the gatehouse of the biggest of the rich houses, his father being the chauffeur-gardener and his mother the housekeeper, and Rosemary in one of the more ordinary-rich houses across the street (though the life her parents led in it was not ordinary-rich at all, since they played no games and never went to parties or took a trip and for some reason used an icebox instead of a refrigerator, until the ice company went out of business).

Ted had a car he had bought for a hundred dollars, and he felt sorry for Rosemary and picked her up in the rain.

When Karin was telling this story she remembered her parents telling it, laughing and interrupting each other in their practiced way. Ted always mentioned the price of the car and its make and year (Studebaker, 1947) and Rosemary mentioned the fact that the passenger door would not open and Ted had to get out and let her climb in over the driver’s seat. And he would tell how soon he took her to her first movie—in the afternoon—and the name of the movie was
Some Like It Hot
, and he came out in broad daylight with lipstick all over his face, because whatever it was that other girls did with lipstick, blot it or powder it or whatever, Rosemary had not learned to do. “She was very enthusiastic,” he always said.