Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Part 28

"That's enough," the woman said. "Get out of that ap.r.o.n. I don't take any back talk from my employees, that's one thing I won't do. You can get your purse and get out of here. And don't go asking me where 's your pay because you haven't been any use to me anyway and this was just supposed to be training."

The gray-haired man was peeking out, with a nervous smile.

So I found myself out on the street again, walking to the streetcar stop. But I knew the way some streets went now and I knew how to use a transfer. I had even had experience at a job. I could say that I had worked behind a lunch counter. If anybody wanted a reference it would be tricky-but I could say the lunch counter was in my hometown. While I waited for the streetcar I took out the list of other places where I meant to apply, and the map that Queenie had given me. But it was later than I'd thought, and most places seemed too far away. I dreaded having to tell Mr. Vorguilla. I decided to walk back, in the hopes that when I got there he 'd have gone.

I had just turned up the hill when I remembered the Post Office. I found my way back to it and got a letter out of the box and walked home again. Surely he would be gone by now.

But he wasn't. When I walked past the open living-room window that overlooked the path beside the house, I heard music. It wasn't what Queenie would play. It was the sort of complicated music that we had heard sometimes coming through the open windows of the Vorguillas' house-music that demanded your attention and then didn't go anywhere, or at least didn't go anywhere soon enough. Cla.s.sical.

Queenie was in the kitchen, wearing another of her skimpy dresses, and all her makeup. She had bangles on her arms. She was setting teacups on a tray. I was dizzy for a moment, coming out of the sunlight, and every inch of my skin bloomed with sweat.

"Shh," Queenie said, because I'd closed the door with a crash.

"They're in there listening to records. It's him and his friend Leslie."

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Just as she said this the music came to an abrupt halt and there was a burst of excited talk.

"One of them plays a record and the other has to guess what it is just from a little bit of it," Queenie said. "They play these little bits and then stop, over and over. It drives you crazy." She started cutting slices off a delicatessen chicken and putting them on b.u.t.tered slices of bread. "Did you get a job?" she said.

"Yes, but it wasn't permanent."

"Oh, well." She didn't seem very interested. But as the music started again she looked up and smiled and said, "Did you go to the-" And she saw the letter I was carrying in my hand.

She dropped the knife and came to me in a hurry, saying softly, "You walked right in with it in your hand. I should have told you, put it in your purse. My private letter." She grabbed it from my hand and right at that moment the kettle on the stove began to shriek.

"Oh, get the kettle. Chrissy, quick, quick! Get the kettle or he 'll be out here, he can't stand the sound."

She had turned her back and was tearing open the envelope.

I took the kettle off the burner, and she said, "Make the tea, please-" in the soft, preoccupied voice of somebody reading an urgent message. "Just pour the water on, it's measured."

She laughed as if she 'd read a private joke. I poured the water on the tea leaves and she said, "Thanks. Oh, thanks, Chrissy; thanks." She turned around and looked at me. Her face was rosy and all the bangles on her arms jingled with a delicate agitation.

She folded up the letter and pulled up her skirt and tucked it under the elastic waistband of her underpants.

She said, "Sometimes he goes through my purse."

I said, "Is the tea for them?"

"Yes. And I have to get back to work. Oh, what am I doing? I have to cut the sandwiches. Where 's the knife?"

I picked up the knife and cut the sandwiches and put them on a plate.

"Don't you want to know who my letter's from?" she said.

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I couldn't think.

I said, "Bet?"

Because I had a hope that a private forgiveness from Bet could be the thing that had made Queenie burst into flower.

I had not even looked at the writing on the envelope.

Queenie 's face changed-for a moment she looked as if she didn't know who that was. Then she recovered her happiness.

She came and put her arms around me and spoke into my ear, in a voice that was shivering and shy and triumphant.

"It's from Andrew. Can you take the tray in to them? I can't.

I can't right now. Oh, thank you."

Before Queenie went off to work she came into the living room and kissed both Mr. Vorguilla and his friend. She kissed both of them on their foreheads. She gave me a b.u.t.terfly wave. "Bye bye."

When I had brought the tray in I saw the annoyance on Mr.

Vorguilla's face, that I wasn't Queenie. But he spoke to me in a surprisingly tolerant way and introduced me to Leslie. Leslie was a stout bald man who at first looked to me almost as old as Mr. Vorguilla. But when you got used to him and took his baldness into account he seemed much younger. He was not the sort of friend I would have expected Mr. Vorguilla to have. He was not brusque or know-it-all but comfortable and full of encouragement. For example, when I told about my employment at the lunch counter he said, "Well you know that's something.

Getting hired the first place you tried. It shows you know how to make a good impression."

I had not found the experience hard to talk about. The presence of Leslie made everything easier and seemed to soften the behavior of Mr. Vorguilla. As if he had to show me a decent courtesy in the presence of his friend. It could also have been that he sensed a change in me. People do sense the difference when you are not afraid of them anymore. He would not be sure - 268*

of this difference and he would have no idea how it came about, but it would puzzle him and make him more careful. He agreed with Leslie when Leslie said I was well out of that job, and he even went on to say that the woman sounded like the sort of hard-bitten chiseler you sometimes found in that kind of hole-in-corner establishment in Toronto.

"And she had no business not paying you," he said.

"You'd think the husband might have come forward," said Leslie. "If he was the druggist, he was the boss."

Mr. Vorguilla said, "He might brew up a special dose someday. For his wife."

It wasn't so hard to pour out tea and offer milk and sugar and pa.s.s sandwiches, and even talk, when you knew something another person didn't know, about a danger he was in. It was just because he didn't know, that I could feel something other than loathing for Mr. Vorguilla. It wasn't that he had changed in himself-or if he had changed it was probably because I had.

Soon he said that it was time for him to get ready to go to work. He went to change his clothes. Then Leslie asked me if I would like to have supper with him.

"Just around the corner there 's a place I go," he said.

"Nothing fancy. Nothing like Stan's place."

I was glad enough to hear that it wouldn't be anyplace fancy. I said, "Sure." And after we had dropped off Mr. Vorguilla at the restaurant we drove in Leslie 's car to a fish and chips place.

Leslie ordered the Super Dinner-though he had just consumed several chicken sandwiches-and I ordered the Regular. He had a beer and I had a c.o.ke.

He talked about himself. He said he wished he had gone to Teachers' College himself instead of choosing music, which did not make for a very settled life.

I was too absorbed in my own situation even to ask him what kind of musician he was. My father had bought me a return ticket, saying, "You never know how things are going to sit with him and her." I had thought of that ticket at the moment I - 269*

watched Queenie tucking Andrew's letter under the waistband of her underpants. Even though I didn't yet know that it was Andrew's letter.

I hadn't just come to Toronto, or come to Toronto to get a summer job. I had come to be part of Queenie 's life. Or if necessary, part of Queenie 's and Mr. Vorguilla's life. Even when I had the fantasy about Queenie living with me, the fantasy had something to do with Mr. Vorguilla and how she would be serving him right.

And when I'd thought of the return ticket I was taking something else for granted. That I could go back and live with Bet and my father and be part of their life.

My father and Bet. Mr. and Mrs. Vorguilla. Queenie and Mr.

Vorguilla. Even Queenie and Andrew. These were couples and each of them, however disjointed, had now or in memory a private burrow with its own heat and disturbance, from which I was cut off. And I had to be, I wished to be, cut off, for there was nothing I could see in their lives to instruct me or encourage me.

Leslie too was a person cut off. Yet he talked to me about various people he was connected to by ties of blood or friendship. His sister and her husband. His nieces and nephews, the married couples he visited and spent holidays with. All of these people had problems, but all had value. He talked about their jobs, lack of jobs, talents, strokes of luck, errors in judgment, with great interest but a lack of pa.s.sion. He was cut off, it seemed, from love or rancor.

I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily that even if it is rejected he can move along as cheerfully as ever. Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that. Just a person who took comfort in the moment and in a sort of reasonable facade of life.

His company was just what I needed, though I hardly realized it. Probably he was being deliberately kind to me. As I had - 270*

thought of myself as being kind to Mr. Vorguilla, or at least protecting him, so unexpectedly, a little while before.

I was at Teachers' College when Queenie ran away again. I got the news in a letter from my father. He said that he did not know just how or when it happened. Mr. Vorguilla hadn't let him know for a while, and then he had, in case Queenie had come back home. My father had told Mr. Vorguilla he didn't think there was much chance of that. In the letter to me he said that at least it wasn't the kind of thing we could say now that Queenie wouldn't do.

For years, even after I was married, I would get a Christmas card from Mr. Vorguilla. Sleighs laden with bright parcels; a happy family in a decorated doorway, welcoming friends.

Perhaps he thought these were the sorts of scenes that would appeal to me in my present way of life. Or perhaps he picked them blindly off the rack. He always included a return address- reminding me of his existence and letting me know where he was, in case of any news.

I had given up expecting that kind of news, myself. I never even found out if it was Andrew that Queenie went away with, or somebody else. Or whether she stayed with Andrew, if he was the one. When my father died there was some money left, and a serious attempt was made to trace her, but without success.

But now something has happened. Now in the years when my children are grown up and my husband has retired, and he and I are travelling a lot, I have a notion that sometimes I see Queenie.

It's not through any particular wish or effort that I see her, and it's not as if I believe it is really her, either.

Once it was in a crowded airport, and she was wearing a sarong and a flower-trimmed straw hat. Tanned and excited, rich-looking, surrounded by friends. And once she was among - 271*

the women at a church door waiting for a glimpse of the wedding party. She wore a spotty suede jacket and she did not look either prosperous or well. Another time she was stopped at a crosswalk, leading a string of nursery-school children on their way to the swimming pool or the park. It was a hot day and her thick middle-aged figure was frankly and comfortably on view, in flowered shorts and a sloganed T-shirt.

The last and the strangest time was in a supermarket in Twin Falls, Idaho. I came around a corner carrying the few things I had collected for a picnic lunch, and there was an old woman leaning on her shopping cart, as if waiting for me. A little wrinkled woman with a crooked mouth and unhealthy-looking brownish skin. Hair in yellow-brown bristles, purple pants. .h.i.tched up over the small mound of her stomach-she was one of those thin women who have nevertheless, with age, lost the convenience of a waistline. The pants could have come from some thrift shop and so could the gaily colored but matted and shrunken sweater b.u.t.toned over a chest no bigger than a ten-year-old's.

The shopping cart was empty. She was not even carrying a purse.

And unlike those other women, this one seemed to know that she was Queenie. She smiled at me with such a merry recognition, and such a yearning to be recognized in return, that you would have thought that this was a great boon-a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand.

And all I did was stretch my mouth pleasantly and impersonally, as at a loony stranger, and keep on going towards the checkout.

Then in the parking lot I made an excuse to my husband, said I'd forgotten something, and hurried back into the store. I went up and down the aisles, looking. But in just that little time the old woman seemed to have gone. She might have gone out right after I did; she might be making her way now along the streets of - 272*

Twin Falls. On foot, or in a car driven by some kind relative or neighbor. Or even in a car she drove herself. There was the bare chance, though, that she was still in the store and that we kept going up and down the aisles, just missing each other. I found myself going in one direction and then in another, shivering in the icy climate of the summer store, looking straight into people 's faces, and probably frightening them, because I was silently beseeching them to tell me where I could find Queenie.

Until I came to my senses and convinced myself that it wasn't possible, and that whoever was or was not Queenie had left me behind.

- 273*

The Bear Came Over the Mountain Fiona lived in her parents' house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish.

Her mother was Icelandic-a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to strange tirades with an absentminded smile. All kinds of people, rich or shabby-looking, delivered these tirades, and kept coming and going and arguing and conferring, sometimes in foreign accents. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn't in a sorority, and this activity in her house was probably the reason.

Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics, though she liked to play "The Four Insurgent Generals"

on the phonograph, and sometimes also she played the "Internationale," very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired, gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her-she said he was a Visigoth-and so were two - 274*

or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.

"Do you think it would be fun-" Fiona shouted. "Do you think it would be fun if we got married?"

He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

Just before they left their house Fiona noticed a mark on the kitchen floor. It came from the cheap black house shoes she had been wearing earlier in the day.

"I thought they'd quit doing that," she said in a tone of ordinary annoyance and perplexity, rubbing at the gray smear that looked as if it had been made by a greasy crayon.

She remarked that she would never have to do this again, since she wasn't taking those shoes with her.

"I guess I'll be dressed up all the time," she said. "Or semi dressed up. It'll be sort of like in a hotel."

She rinsed out the rag she 'd been using and hung it on the rack inside the door under the sink. Then she put on her golden-brown fur-collared ski jacket over a white turtle-necked sweater and tailored fawn slacks. She was a tall, narrow-shouldered woman, seventy years old but still upright and trim, with long legs and long feet, delicate wrists and ankles and tiny, almost comical-looking ears. Her hair, which was light as milkweed fluff, had gone from pale blond to white somehow without Grant's noticing exactly when, and she still wore it down to her shoulders, as her mother had done. (That was the thing that had alarmed Grant's own mother, a small-town widow who worked as a doctor's receptionist. The long white hair on Fiona's mother, - 275*

even more than the state of the house, had told her all she needed to know about att.i.tudes and politics.) Otherwise Fiona with her fine bones and small sapphire eyes was nothing like her mother. She had a slightly crooked mouth which she emphasized now with red lipstick-usually the last thing she did before she left the house. She looked just like herself on this day-direct and vague as in fact she was, sweet and ironic.

Over a year ago Grant had started noticing so many little yellow notes stuck up all over the house. That was not entirely new.

She 'd always written things down-the t.i.tle of a book she 'd heard mentioned on the radio or the jobs she wanted to make sure she did that day. Even her morning schedule was written down-he found it mystifying and touching in its precision.

7 a.m. Yoga. 7:30-7:45 teeth face hair. 7:45-8:15 walk.

8:15 Grant and Breakfast.

The new notes were different. Taped onto the kitchen drawers-Cutlery, Dishtowels, Knives. Couldn't she have just opened the drawers and seen what was inside? He remembered a story about the German soldiers on border patrol in Czechoslovakia during the war. Some Czech had told him that each of the patrol dogs wore a sign that said Hund. Why? said the Czechs, and the Germans said, Because that is a hund.

He was going to tell Fiona that, then thought he 'd better not.

They always laughed at the same things, but suppose this time she didn't laugh?

Worse things were coming. She went to town and phoned him from a booth to ask him how to drive home. She went for her walk across the field into the woods and came home by the fence line-a very long way round. She said that she 'd counted on fences always taking you somewhere.

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It was hard to figure out. She said that about fences as if it was a joke, and she had remembered the phone number without any trouble.

"I don't think it's anything to worry about," she said. "I expect I'm just losing my mind."

He asked if she had been taking sleeping pills.