SOON
Two profiles face each other. One the profile of a pure white heifer, with a particularly mild and tender expression, the other that of a green-faced man who is neither young nor old. He seems to be a minor official, maybe a postman—he wears that sort of cap. His lips are pale, the whites of his eyes shining. A hand that is probably his offers up, from the lower margin of the painting, a little tree or an exuberant branch, fruited with jewels.
At the upper margin of the painting are dark clouds, and underneath them some small tottery houses and a toy church with its toy cross, perched on the curved surface of the earth. Within this curve a small man (drawn to a larger scale, however, than the buildings) walks along purposefully with a scythe on his shoulder, and a woman, drawn to the same scale, seems to wait for him. But she is hanging upside down.
There are other things as well. For instance, a girl milking a cow, within the heifer’s cheek.
Juliet decided at once to buy this print for her parents’ Christmas present.
“Because it reminds me of them,” she said to Christa, her friend who had come down with her from Whale Bay to do some shopping. They were in the gift shop of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Christa laughed. “The green man and the cow? They’ll be flattered.”
Christa never took anything seriously at first, she had to make some joke about it. Juliet wasn’t bothered. Three months pregnant with the baby that would turn out to be Penelope, she was suddenly free of nausea, and for that reason, or some other, she was subject to fits of euphoria. She thought of food all the time, and hadn’t even wanted to come into the gift shop, because she had spotted a lunchroom.
She loved everything in the picture, but particularly the little figures and rickety buildings at the top of it. The man with the scythe and the woman hanging upside down.
She looked for the title. I and the Village.
It made exquisite sense.
“Chagall. I like Chagall,” said Christa. “Picasso was a bastard.”
Juliet was so happy with what she had found that she could hardly pay attention.
“You know what he is supposed to have said? Chagall is for shopgirls,” Christa told her. “So what’s wrong with shopgirls? Chagall should have said, Picasso is for people with funny faces.”
“I mean, it makes me think of their life,” Juliet said. “I don’t know why, but it does.”
She had already told Christa some things about her parents—how they lived in a curious but not unhappy isolation, though her father was a popular schoolteacher. Partly they were cut off by Sara’s heart trouble, but also by their subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network, which nobody around them listened to. By Sara’s making her own clothes—sometimes ineptly— from Vogue patterns, instead of Butterick. Even by the way they preserved some impression of youth instead of thickening and slouching like the parents of Juliet’s schoolfellows. Juliet had described Sam as looking like her—long neck, a slight bump to the chin, light-brown floppy hair—and Sara as a frail pale blonde, a wispy untidy beauty.
When Penelope was thirteen months old, Juliet flew with her to Toronto, then caught the train. This was in 1969. She got off in a town twenty miles or so away from the town where she had grown up, and where Sam and Sara still lived. Apparently the train did not stop there anymore.
She was disappointed to get off at this unfamiliar station and not to see reappear, at once, the trees and sidewalks and houses she remembered—then, very soon, her own house, Sam and Sara’s house, spacious but plain, no doubt with its same blistered and shabby white paint, behind its bountiful soft-maple tree.
Sam and Sara, here in this town where she’d never seen them before, were smiling but anxious, diminished.
Sara gave a curious little cry, as if something had pecked her. A couple of people on the platform turned to look.
Apparently it was only excitement.
“We’re long and short, but still we match,” she said.
At first Juliet did not understand what was meant. Then she figured it out—Sara was wearing a black linen skirt down to her calves and a matching jacket. The jacket’s collar and cuffs were of a shiny lime-green cloth with black polka dots. A turban of the same green material covered her hair. She must have made the outfit herself, or got some dressmaker to make it for her. Its colors were unkind to her skin, which looked as if fine chalk dust had settled over it.
Juliet was wearing a black minidress.
“I was wondering what you’d think of me, black in the summertime, like I’m all in mourning,” Sara said. “And here you’re dressed to match. You look so smart, I’m all in favor of these short dresses.”
“And long hair,” said Sam. “An absolute hippy.” He bent to look into the baby’s face. “Hello, Penelope.”
Sara said, “What a dolly.”
She reached out for Penelope—though the arms that slid out of her sleeves were sticks too frail to hold any such burden. And they did not have to, because Penelope, who had tensed at the first sound of her grandmother’s voice, now yelped and turned away, and hid her face in Juliet’s neck.
Sara laughed. “Am I such a scarecrow?” Again her voice was ill controlled, rising to shrill peaks and falling away, drawing stares. This was new—though maybe not entirely. Juliet had an idea that people might always have looked her mother’s way when she laughed or talked, but in the old days it would have been a spurt of merriment they noticed, something girlish and attractive (though not everybody would have liked that either, they would have said she was always trying to get attention).
Juliet said, “She’s so tired.”
Sam introduced the young woman who was standing behind them, keeping her distance as if she was taking care not to be identified as part of their group. And in fact it had not occurred to Juliet that she was.
“Juliet, this is Irene. Irene Avery.”
Juliet stuck out her hand as well as she could while holding Penelope and the diaper bag, and when it became evident that Irene was not going to shake hands—or perhaps did not notice the intention—she smiled. Irene did not smile back. She stood quite still but gave the impression of wanting to bolt.
“Hello,” said Juliet.
Irene said, “Pleased to meet you,” in a sufficiently audible voice, but without expression.
“Irene is our good fairy,” Sara said, and then Irene’s face did change. She scowled a little, with sensible embarrassment.
She was not as tall as Juliet—who was tall—but she was broader in the shoulders and hips, with strong arms and a stubborn chin. She had thick, springy black hair, pulled back from her face into a stubby ponytail, thick and rather hostile black eyebrows, and the sort of skin that browns easily. Her eyes were green or blue, a light surprising color against this skin, and hard to look into, being deep set. Also because she held her head slightly lowered and twisted her face to the side. This wariness seemed hardened and deliberate.
“She does one heck of a lot of work for a fairy,” Sam said, with his large strategic grin. “I’ll tell the world she does.”
And now of course Juliet recalled the mention in letters of some woman who had come in to help, because of Sara’s strength having gone so drastically downhill. But she had thought of somebody much older. Irene was surely no older than she was herself.
The car was the same Pontiac that Sam had got secondhand maybe ten years ago. The original blue paint showed in streaks here and there but was mostly faded to gray, and the effects of winter road salt could be seen in its petticoat fringe of rust.
“The old gray mare,” said Sara, almost out of breath after the short walk from the railway platform.
“She hasn’t given up,” said Juliet. She spoke admiringly, as seemed to be expected. She had forgotten that this was what they called the car, though it was the name she had thought up herself.
“Oh, she never gives up,” said Sara, once she was settled with Irene’s help in the backseat. “And we’d never give up on her.”
Juliet got into the front seat, juggling Penelope, who was beginning again to whimper. The heat inside the car was shocking, even though it had been parked with the windows down in the scanty shade of the station poplars.
“Actually I’m considering—,” said Sam as he backed out, “I’m considering turning her in for a truck.”
“He doesn’t mean it,” shrieked Sara.
“For the business,” Sam continued. “It’d be a lot handier. And you’d get a certain amount of advertising every time you drove down the street, just from the name on the door.”
“He’s teasing,” Sara said. “How am I going to ride around in a vehicle that says Fresh Vegetables? Am I supposed to be the squash or the cabbage?”
“Better pipe down, Missus,” Sam said, “or you won’t have any breath left when we reach home.”
After nearly thirty years of teaching in the public schools around the county—ten years in the last school—Sam had suddenly quit and decided to get into the business of selling vegetables, full-time. He had always cultivated a big vegetable garden, and raspberry canes, in the extra lot beside their house, and they had sold their surplus produce to a few people around town. But now, apparently, this was to change into his way of making a living, selling to grocery stores and perhaps eventually putting up a market stall at the front gate.
“You’re serious about all this?” said Juliet quietly.
“Darn right I am.”
“You’re not going to miss teaching?”
“Not on your Nelly-O. I was fed up. I was fed up to the eyeballs.”
It was true that after all those years, he had never been offered, in any school, the job of principal. She supposed that was what he was fed up with. He was a remarkable teacher, the one whose antics and energy everyone would remember, his Grade Six unlike any other year in his pupils’ lives. Yet he had been passed over, time and again, and probably for that very reason. His methods could be seen to undercut authority. So you could imagine Authority saying that he was not the sort of man to be in charge, he’d do less harm where he was.
He liked outdoor work, he was good at talking to people, he would probably do well, selling vegetables.
But Sara would hate it.
Juliet did not like it either. If there was a side to be on, however, she would have to choose his. She was not going to define herself as a snob.
And the truth was that she saw herself—she saw herself and Sam and Sara, but particularly herself and Sam—as superior in their own way to everybody around them. So what should his peddling vegetables matter?
Sam spoke now in a quieter, conspiratorial voice.
“What’s her name?”
He meant the baby’s.
“Penelope. We’re never going to call her Penny. Penelope.”
“No, I mean—I mean her last name.”
“Oh. Well, it’s Henderson-Porteous I guess. Or Porteous-Henderson. But maybe that’s too much of a mouthful, when she’s already called Penelope? We knew that but we wanted Penelope. We’ll have to settle it somehow.”
“So. He’s given her his name,” Sam said. “Well, that’s something. I mean, that’s good.”
Juliet was surprised for a moment, then not.
“Of course he has,” she said. Pretending to be mystified and amused. “She’s his.”
“Oh yes. Yes. But given the circumstances.”
“I forget about the circumstances,” she said. “If you mean the fact that we’re not married, it’s hardly anything to take into account. Where we live, the people we know, it is not a thing anybody thinks about.”
“Suppose not,” said Sam. “Was he married to the first one?”
Juliet had told them about Eric’s wife, whom he had cared for during the eight years that she had lived after her car accident.
“Ann? Yes. Well, I don’t really know. But yes. I think so. Yes.”
Sara called into the front seat, “Wouldn’t it be nice to stop for ice cream?”
“We’ve got ice cream in the fridge at home,” Sam called back. And added quietly, shockingly, to Juliet, “Take her into anyplace for a treat, and she’ll put on a show.”
The windows were still down, the warm wind blew through the car. It was full summer—a season which never arrived, as far as Juliet could see, on the west coast. The hardwood trees were humped over the far edge of the fields, making blue-black caves of shade, and the crops and the meadows in front of them, under the hard sunlight, were gold and green. Vigorous young wheat and barley and corn and beans—fairly blistering your eyes.
Sara said, “What’s this conference in aid of? In the front seat? We can’t hear back here for the wind.”
Sam said, “Nothing interesting. Just asking Juliet if her fellow’s still doing the fishing.”
Eric made his living prawn fishing, and had done so for a long time. Once he had been a medical student. That had come to an end because he had performed an abortion, on a friend (not a girlfriend). All had gone well, but somehow the story got out. This was something Juliet had thought of revealing to her broad-minded parents. She had wanted, perhaps, to establish him as an educated man, not just a fisherman. But why should that matter, especially now that Sam was a vegetable man? Also, their broad-mindedness was possibly not so reliable as she had thought.
There was more to be sold than fresh vegetables and berries. Jam, bottled juice, relish, were turned out in the kitchen. The first morning of Juliet’s visit, raspberry-jam making was in progress. Irene was in charge, her blouse wet with steam or sweat, sticking to her skin between the shoulder blades. Every so often she flashed a look at the television set, which had been wheeled down the back hall to the kitchen doorway, so that you had to squeeze around it to get into the room. On the screen was a children’s morning program, showing a Bullwinkle cartoon. Now and then Irene gave a loud laugh at the cartoon antics, and Juliet laughed a little, to be comradely. Of this Irene took no notice.
Counter space had to be cleared so that Juliet could boil and mash an egg for Penelope’s breakfast, and make some coffee and toast for herself. “Is that enough room?” Irene asked her, in a voice that was dubious, as if Juliet was an intruder whose demands could not be foreseen.
Close-up, you could see how many fine black hairs grew on Irene’s forearms. Some grew on her cheeks, too, just in front of her ears.
In her sidelong way she watched everything Juliet did, watched her fiddle with the knobs on the stove (not remembering at first which burners they controlled), watched her lifting the egg out of the saucepan and peeling off the shell (which stuck, this time, and came away in little bits rather than in large easy pieces), then watched her choosing the saucer to mash it in.
“You don’t want her to drop that on the floor.” This was a reference to the china saucer. “Don’t you got a plastic dish for her?”
“I’ll watch it,” Juliet said.
It turned out that Irene was a mother, too. She had a boy three years old and a daughter just under two. Their names were Trevor and Tracy. Their father had been killed last summer in an accident at the chicken barn where he worked. She herself was three years younger than Juliet—twenty-two. The information about the children and the husband came out in answer to Juliet’s questions, and the age could be figured from what she said next.
When Juliet said, “Oh, I’m sorry”—speaking about the accident and feeling that she had been rude to pry, and that it was now hypocritical of her to commiserate—Irene said, “Yeah. Right in time for my twenty-first birthday,” as if misfortunes were something to accumulate, like charms on a bracelet.
After Penelope had eaten all of the egg that she would accept, Juliet hoisted her onto one hip and carried her upstairs.
Halfway up she realized that she had not washed the saucer.
There was nowhere to leave the baby, who was not yet walking but could crawl very quickly. Certainly she could not be left for even five minutes in the kitchen, with the boiling water in the sterilizer and the hot jam and the chopping knives—it was too much to ask Irene to watch her. And first thing this morning she had again refused to make friends with Sara. So Juliet carried her up the enclosed stairs to the attic—having shut the door behind—and set her there on the steps to play, while she herself looked for the old playpen. Fortunately Penelope was an expert on steps.
The house was a full two stories tall, its rooms highceilinged but boxlike—or so they seemed to Juliet now. The roof was steeply pitched, so that you could walk around in the middle of the attic. Juliet used to do that, when she was a child. She walked around telling herself some story she had read, with certain additions or alterations. Dancing—that too—in front of an imaginary audience. The real audience consisted of broken or simply banished furniture, old trunks, an immensely heavy buffalo coat, the purple martin house (a present from long-ago students of Sam’s, which had failed to attract any purple martins), the German helmet supposed to have been brought home by Sam’s father from the First World War, and an unintentionally comic amateur painting of the Empress of Ireland sinking in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with matchstick figures flying off in all directions.
And there, leaning against the wall, was I and the Village. Face out—no attempt had been made to hide it. And no dust on it to speak of, so it had not been there long.
She found the playpen, after a few moments of searching. It was a handsome heavy piece of furniture, with a wooden floor and spindle sides. And the baby carriage. Her parents had kept everything, had hoped for another child. There had been one miscarriage at least. Laughter in their bed, on Sunday mornings, had made Juliet feel as if the house had been invaded by a stealthy, even shameful, disturbance, not favorable to herself.
The baby carriage was of the kind that folded down to become a stroller. This was something Juliet had forgotten about, or hadn’t known. Sweating by now, and covered with dust, she got to work to effect this transformation. This sort of job was never easy for her, she never grasped right away the manner in which things were put together, and she might have dragged the whole thing downstairs and gone out to the garden to get Sam to help her, but for the thought of Irene. Irene’s flickering pale eyes, indirect but measuring looks, competent hands. Her vigilance, in which there was something that couldn’t quite be called contempt. Juliet didn’t know what it could be called. An attitude, indifferent but uncompromising, like a cat’s.
She managed at last to get the stroller into shape. It was cumbersome, half again as big as the stroller she was used to. And filthy, of course. As she was herself by now, and Penelope, on the steps, even more so. And right beside the baby’s hand was something Juliet hadn’t even noticed. A nail. The sort of thing you paid no attention to, till you had a baby at the hand-to-mouth stage, and that you had then to be on the lookout for all the time.
And she hadn’t been. Everything here distracted her. The heat, Irene, the things that were familiar and the things that were unfamiliar.
I and the Village.
“Oh,” said Sara. “I hoped you wouldn’t notice. Don’t take it to heart.”
The sunroom was now Sara’s bedroom. Bamboo shades had been hung on all the windows, filling the small room—once part of the verandah—with a brownish-yellow light and a uniform heat. Sara, however, was wearing woolly pink pajamas. Yesterday, at the station, with her pencilled eyebrows and raspberry lipstick, her turban and suit, she had looked to Juliet like an elderly Frenchwoman (not that Juliet had seen many elderly Frenchwomen), but now, with her white hair flying out in wisps, her bright eyes anxious under nearly nonexistent brows, she looked more like an oddly aged child. She was sitting up against the pillows with the quilts pulled up to her waist. When Juliet had walked her to the bathroom, earlier, it had been revealed that in spite of the heat she was wearing both socks and slippers in bed.
A straight-backed chair had been placed by her bed, its seat being easier for her to reach than a table. On it were pills and medicines, talcum powder, moisturizing lotion, a half-drunk cup of milky tea, a glass filmed with the traces of some dark tonic, probably iron. On top of the bed were magazines—old copies of Vogue and the Ladies’ Home Journal.
“I’m not,” said Juliet.
“We did have it hanging up. It was in the back hall by the dining-room door. Then Daddy took it down.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say anything about it to me. He didn’t say that he was going to. Then came a day when it was just gone.”
“Why would he take it down?”
“Oh. It would be some notion he had, you know.”
“What sort of a notion?”
“Oh. I think—you know, I think it probably had to do with Irene. That it would disturb Irene.”
“There wasn’t anybody naked in it. Not like the Botticelli.”
For indeed there was a print of The Birth of Venus hanging in Sam and Sara’s living room. It had been the subject of nervous jokes years ago on the occasion when they had the other teachers to supper.
“No. But it was modern. I think it made Daddy uncomfortable. Or maybe looking at it with Irene looking at it—that made him uncomfortable. He might be afraid it would make her feel—oh, sort of contemptuous of us. You know—that we were weird. He wouldn’t like for Irene to think we were that kind of people.”
Juliet said, “The kind of people who would hang that kind of picture? You mean he’d care so much what she thought of our pictures ?”
“You know Daddy.”
“He’s not afraid to disagree with people. Wasn’t that the trouble in his job?”
“What?” said Sara. “Oh. Yes. He can disagree. But he’s careful sometimes. And Irene. Irene is—he’s careful of her. She’s very valuable to us, Irene.”
“Did he think she’d quit her job because she thought we had a weird picture?”
“I would have left it up, dear. I value anything that comes from you. But Daddy . . .”
Juliet said nothing. From the time when she was nine or ten until she was perhaps fourteen, she and Sara had an understanding about Sam. You know Daddy.
That was the time of their being women together. Home permanents were tried on Juliet’s stubborn fine hair, dressmaking sessions produced the outfits like nobody else’s, suppers were peanut-butter-and-tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches on the evenings Sam stayed late for a school meeting. Stories were told and retold about Sara’s old boyfriends and girlfriends, the jokes they played and the fun they had, in the days when Sara was a schoolteacher too, before her heart got too bad. Stories from the time before that, when she lay in bed with rheumatic fever and had the imaginary friends Rollo and Maxine who solved mysteries, even murders, like the characters in certain children’s books. Glimpses of Sam’s besotted courtship, disasters with the borrowed car, the time he showed up at Sara’s door disguised as a tramp.
Sara and Juliet, making fudge and threading ribbons through the eyelet trim on their petticoats, the two of them intertwined. And then abruptly, Juliet hadn’t wanted any more of it, she had wanted instead to talk to Sam late at night in the kitchen, to ask him about black holes, the Ice Age, God. She hated the way Sara undermined their talk with wide-eyed ingenuous questions, the way Sara always tried somehow to bring the subject back to herself. That was why the talks had to be late at night and there had to be the understanding neither she nor Sam ever spoke about. Wait till we’re rid of Sara. Just for the time being, of course.
There was a reminder going along with that. Be nice to Sara. She risked her life to have you, that’s worth remembering.
“Daddy doesn’t mind disagreeing with people that are over him,” Sara said, taking a deep breath. “But you know how he is with people that are under him. He’ll do anything to make sure they don’t feel he’s any different from them, he just has to put himself down on their level—”
Juliet did know, of course. She knew the way Sam talked to the boy at the gas pumps, the way he joked in the hardware store. But she said nothing.
“He has to suck up to them,” said Sara with a sudden change of tone, a wavering edge of viciousness, a weak chuckle.
Juliet cleaned up the stroller, and Penelope, and herself, and set off on a walk into town. She had the excuse that she needed a certain brand of mild disinfectant soap with which to wash the diapers—if she used ordinary soap the baby would get a rash. But she had other reasons, irresistible though embarrassing.
This was the way she had walked to school for years of her life. Even when she was going to college, and came home on a visit, she was still the same—a girl going to school. Would she never be done going to school? Somebody asked Sam that at a time when she had just won the Intercollegiate Latin Translation Prize, and he had said, “ ’Fraid not.” He told this story on himself. God forbid that he should mention prizes. Leave Sara to do that—though Sara might have forgotten just what the prize was for.
And here she was, redeemed. Like any other young woman, pushing her baby. Concerned about the diaper soap. And this wasn’t just her baby. Her love child. She sometimes spoke of Penelope that way, just to Eric. He took it as a joke, she said it as a joke, because of course they lived together and had done so for some time, and they intended to go on together. The fact that they were not married meant nothing to him, so far as she knew, and she often forgot about it, herself. But occasionally— and now, especially, here at home, it was the fact of her unmarried state that gave her some flush of accomplishment, a silly surge of bliss.
“So—you went upstreet today,” Sam said. (Had he always said upstreet? Sara and Juliet said uptown.) “See anybody you knew?”
“I had to go to the drugstore,” Juliet said. “So I was talking to Charlie Little.”
This conversation took place in the kitchen, after eleven o’clock at night. Juliet had decided that this was the best time to make up Penelope’s bottles for tomorrow.
“Little Charlie?” said Sam—who had always had this other habit she hadn’t remembered, the habit of continuing to call people by their school nicknames. “Did he admire the offspring?”
“Of course.”
“And well he might.”
Sam was sitting at the table, drinking rye and smoking a cigarette. His drinking whisky was new. Because Sara’s father had been a drunk—not a down-and-out drunk, he had continued to practice as a veterinarian, but enough of a terror around the house to make his daughter horrified by drinking—Sam had never used to so much as drink a beer, at least to Juliet’s knowledge, at home.
Juliet had gone into the drugstore because that was the only place to buy the diaper soap. She hadn’t expected to see Charlie, though it was his family’s store. The last she had heard of him, he was going to be an engineer. She had mentioned that to him, today, maybe tactlessly, but he had been easy and jovial when he told her that it hadn’t worked out. He had put on weight around the middle, and his hair had thinned, had lost some of its wave and glisten. He had greeted Juliet with enthusiasm, with flattery for herself as well as her baby, and this had confused her, so that she had felt her face and neck hot, slightly perspiring, all the time he talked to her. In high school he would have had no time for her—except for a decent greeting, since his manners were always affable, democratic. He took out the most desirable girls in the school, and was now, as he told her, married to one of them. Janey Peel. They had two children, one of them about Penelope’s age, one older. That was the reason, he said, with a candor that seemed to owe something to Juliet’s own situation—that was the reason he hadn’t gone on to become an engineer.
So he knew how to win a smile and a gurgle from Penelope, and he chatted with Juliet as a fellow parent, somebody now on the same level. She felt idiotically flattered and pleased. But there was more to his attention than that—the quick glance at her unadorned left hand, the joke about his own marriage. And something else. He appraised her, covertly, perhaps he saw her now as a woman displaying the fruits of a boldly sexual life. Juliet, of all people. The gawk, the scholar.
“Does she look like you?” he had asked, when he squatted down to peer at Penelope.
“More like her father,” said Juliet casually, but with a flood of pride, the sweat now pearling on her upper lip.
“Does she?” said Charlie, and straightened up, speaking confidentially. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. I thought it was a shame—”
Juliet said to Sam, “He told me he thought it was a shame what happened with you.”
“He did, did he? What did you say to that?”
“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what he meant. But I didn’t want him to know that.”
“No.”
She sat down at the table. “I’d like a drink but I don’t like whisky.”
“So you drink now, too?”
“Wine. We make our own wine. Everybody in the Bay does.”
He told her a joke then, the sort of joke that he would never have told her before. It involved a couple going to a motel, and it ended up with the line “So it’s like what I always tell the girls at Sunday school—you don’t have to drink and smoke to have a good time.”
She laughed but felt her face go hot, as with Charlie.
“Why did you quit your job?” she said. “Were you let go because of me?”
“Come on now.” Sam laughed. “Don’t think you’re so important. I wasn’t let go. I wasn’t fired.”
“All right then. You quit.”
“I quit.”
“Did it have anything at all to do with me?”
“I quit because I got goddamn sick of my neck always in that noose. I was on the point of quitting for years.”
“It had nothing to do with me?”
“All right,” Sam said. “I got into an argument. There were things said.”
“What things?”
“You don’t need to know.
“And don’t worry,” he said after a moment. “They didn’t fire me. They couldn’t have fired me. There are rules. It’s like I told you—I was ready to go anyway.”
“But you don’t realize,” said Juliet. “You don’t realize. You don’t realize just how stupid this is and what a disgusting place this is to live in, where people say that kind of thing, and how if I told people I know this, they wouldn’t believe it. It would seem like a joke.”
“Well. Unfortunately your mother and I don’t live where you live. Here is where we live. Does that fellow of yours think it’s a joke too? I don’t want to talk any more about this tonight, I’m going to bed. I’m going to look in on Mother and then I’m going to bed.”
“The passenger train—,” said Juliet with continued energy, even scorn. “It does still stop here. Doesn’t it? You didn’t want me getting off here. Did you?”
On his way out of the room, her father did not answer.
Light from the last streetlight in town now fell across Juliet’s bed. The big soft maple tree had been cut down, replaced by a patch of Sam’s rhubarb. Last night she had left the curtains closed to shade the bed, but tonight she felt that she needed the outside air. So she had to switch the pillow down to the foot of the bed, along with Penelope, who had slept like an angel with the full light in her face.
She wished she had drunk a little of the whisky. She lay stiff with frustration and anger, composing in her head a letter to Eric. I don’t know what I’m doing here, I should never have come here, I can’t wait to go home.
Home.
When it was barely light in the morning, she woke to the noise of a vacuum cleaner. Then a voice—Sam’s—interrupted this noise, and she must have fallen asleep again. When she woke up later, she thought it must have been a dream. Otherwise Penelope would have woken up, and she hadn’t.
The kitchen was cooler this morning, no longer full of the smell of simmering fruit. Irene was fixing little caps of gingham cloth, and labels, onto all the jars.
“I thought I heard you vacuuming,” said Juliet, dredging up cheerfulness. “I must have dreamed it. It was only about five o’clock in the morning.”
Irene did not answer for a moment. She was writing on a label. She wrote with great concentration, her lips caught between her teeth.
“That was her,” she said when she had finished. “She woke your dad up and he had to go and make her quit.”
This seemed unlikely. Yesterday Sara had left her bed only to go to the bathroom.
“He told me,” said Irene. “She wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks she’s going to do something and then he has to get up and make her quit.”
“She must have a spurt of energy then,” said Juliet.
“Yeah.” Irene was getting to work on another label. When that was done, she faced Juliet.
“Wants to wake your dad up and get attention, that’s it. Him dead tired and he’s got to get out of bed and tend to her.”
Juliet turned away. Not wanting to set Penelope down—as if the child wasn’t safe here—she juggled her on one hip while she fished the egg out with a spoon, tapped and shelled and mashed it with one hand.
While she fed Penelope she was afraid to speak, lest the tone of her voice alarm the baby and set her wailing. Something communicated itself to Irene, however. She said in a more subdued voice—but with an undertone of defiance—“That’s just the way they get. When they’re sick like that, they can’t help it. They can’t think about nobody but themselves.”
Sara’s eyes were closed, but she opened them immediately. “Oh, my dear ones,” she said, as if laughing at herself. “My Juliet. My Penelope.”
Penelope seemed to be getting used to her. At least she did not cry, this morning, or turn her face away.
“Here,” said Sara, reaching for one of her magazines. “Set her down and let her work at this.”
Penelope looked dubious for a moment, then grabbed a page and tore it vigorously.
“There you go,” said Sara. “All babies love to tear up magazines. I remember.”
On the bedside chair there was a bowl of Cream of Wheat, barely touched.
“You didn’t eat your breakfast?” Juliet said. “Is that not what you wanted?”
Sara looked at the bowl as if serious consideration was called for, but couldn’t be managed.
“I don’t remember. No, I guess I didn’t want it.” She had a little fit of giggling and gasping. “Who knows? Crossed my mind—she could be poisoning me.
“I’m just kidding,” she said when she recovered. “But she’s very fierce. Irene. We mustn’t underestimate—Irene. Did you see the hairs on her arms?”
“Like cats’ hairs,” said Juliet.
“Like skunks’.”
“We must hope none of them get into the jam.”
“Don’t make me—laugh any more—”
Penelope became so absorbed in tearing up magazines that in a while Juliet was able to leave her in Sara’s room and carry the Cream of Wheat out to the kitchen. Without saying anything, she began to make an eggnog. Irene was in and out, carrying boxes of jam jars to the car. On the back steps, Sam was hosing off the earth that clung to the newly dug potatoes. He had begun to sing—too softly at first for his words to be heard. Then, as Irene came up the steps, more loudly.
“Irene, good ni-i-ight,
Irene, good night,
Good night, Irene, good night, Irene,
I’ll see you in my dreams.”
Irene, in the kitchen, swung around and yelled, “Don’t sing that song about me.”
“What song about you?” said Sam, with feigned amazement. “Who’s singing a song about you?”
“You were. You just were.”
“Oh—that song. That song about Irene? The girl in the song? By golly—I forgot that was your name too.”
He started up again, but humming, stealthily. Irene stood listening, flushed, with her chest going up and down, waiting to pounce if she should hear a word.
“Don’t you sing about me. If it’s got my name in it, it’s about me.”
Suddenly Sam burst out in full force.
“Last Saturday night I got married,
Me and my wife settled down—”
“Stop it. You stop it,” cried Irene, wide-eyed, inflamed. “If you don’t stop I’ll go out there and squirt the hose on you.”
Sam was delivering jam, that afternoon, to various grocery stores and a few gift shops which had placed orders. He invited Juliet to come along. He had gone to the hardware store and bought a brand-new baby’s car seat for Penelope.
“That’s one thing we don’t have in the attic,” he said. “When you were little, I don’t know if they had them. Anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered. We didn’t have a car.”
“It’s very spiffy,” said Juliet. “I hope it didn’t cost a fortune.”
“A mere bagatelle,” said Sam, bowing her into the car.
Irene was in the field picking more raspberries. These would be for pies. Sam tooted the horn twice and waved as they set off, and Irene decided to respond, raising one arm as if batting away a fly.
“That’s a dandy girl,” Sam said. “I don’t know how we would have survived without her. But I imagine she seems pretty rough to you.”
“I hardly know her.”
“No. She’s scared stiff of you.”
“Surely not.” And trying to think of something appreciative or at least neutral to say about Irene, Juliet asked how her husband had been killed at the chicken barn.
“I don’t know if he was a criminal type or just immature. Anyway, he got in with some goons who were planning a sideline in stolen chickens and of course they managed to set off the alarm and the farmer came out with a gun and whether he meant to shoot him or not he did—”
“My God.”
“So Irene and her in-laws went to court but the fellow got off. Well, he would. It must have been pretty hard on her, though. Even if it doesn’t seem that the husband was much of a prize.”
Juliet said that of course it must have been, and asked him if Irene was somebody he had taught at school.
“No no no. She hardly got to school, as far as I can make out.”
He said that her family had lived up north, somewhere near Huntsville. Yes. Somewhere near there. One day they all went into town. Father, mother, kids. And the father told them he had things to do and he would meet them in a while. He told them where. When. And they walked around with no money to spend, until it was time. And he just never showed up.
“Never intended to show up. Ditched them. So they had to go on welfare. Lived in some shack out in the country, where it was cheap. Irene’s older sister, the one who was the mainstay, more than the mother, I gather—she died of a burst appendix. No way of getting her into town, snowstorm on and they didn’t have a phone. Irene didn’t want to go back to school then, because her sister had sort of protected her from the way the other kids would act towards them. She may seem thick-skinned now but I guess she wasn’t always. Maybe even now it’s more of a masquerade.”
And now, he said, now Irene’s mother was looking after the little boy and the little girl, but guess what, after all these years the father had shown up and was trying to get the mother to go back to him, and if that should happen Irene didn’t know what she’d do, since she didn’t want her kids near him.
“They’re cute kids, too. The little girl has some problem with a cleft palate and she’s already had one operation but she’ll need another later on. She’ll be all right. But that’s just one more thing.”
One more thing.
What was the matter with Juliet? She felt no real sympathy. She felt herself rebelling, deep down, against this wretched litany. It was too much. When the cleft palate appeared in the story what she had really wanted to do was complain. Too much.
She knew she was wrong, but the feeling would not budge. She was afraid to say anything more, lest out of her mouth she betray her hard heart. She was afraid she would say to Sam, “Just what is so wonderful about all this misery, does it make her a saint?” Or she might say, most unforgivably, “I hope you don’t mean to get us mixed up with people like that.”
“I’m telling you,” Sam said, “at the time she came to help us out I was at wits’ end. Last fall, your mother was a downright catastrophe. And not exactly that she was letting everything go. No. Better if she had let everything go. Better if she’d done nothing. What she did, she’d start one job up and then she could not get on with it. Over and over. Not that this was anything absolutely new. I mean, I always had to pick up after her and look after her and help her do the housework. Me and you both—remember? She’d always been this sweet pretty girl with a bad heart and she was used to being waited on. Once in a while over the years it did occur to me she could have tried harder.
“But it got so bad,” he said. “It got so I’d come home to the washing machine in the middle of the kitchen floor and wet clothes slopping all over the place. And some baking mess she’d started on and given up on, stuff charred to a crisp in the oven. I was scared she’d set herself on fire. Set the house on fire. I’d tell her and tell her, stay in bed. But she wouldn’t and then she’d be all in this mess, crying. I tried a couple of girls coming in and they just couldn’t handle her. So then—Irene.
“Irene,” he said with a robust sigh. “I bless the day. I tell you. Bless the day.”
But like all good things, he said, this must come to an end. Irene was getting married. To a forty- or fifty-year-old widower. Farmer. He was supposed to have money and for her sake Sam guessed he hoped it was true. Because the man did not have much else to recommend him.
“By Jesus he doesn’t. As far as I can see he’s only got one tooth in his head. Bad sign, in my opinion. Too proud or stingy to get choppers. Think of it—a grand-looking girl like her.”
“When is the event?”
“In the fall sometime. In the fall.”
Penelope had been sleeping all this time—she had gone to sleep in her car seat almost as soon as they started to move. The front windows were down and Juliet could smell the hay, which was freshly cut and baled—nobody made hay coils anymore. Some elm trees were still standing, marvels now, in their isolation.
They stopped in a village built all along one street in a narrow valley. Bedrock stuck out of the valley walls—the only place for many miles around where such massive rocks were to be seen. Juliet remembered coming here when there was a special park which you paid to enter. In the park there was a fountain, a teahouse where they served strawberry shortcake and ice cream—and surely other things which she could not remember. Caves in the rock were named after each of the Seven Dwarfs. Sam and Sara had sat on the ground by the fountain eating ice cream while she had rushed ahead to explore the caves. (Which were nothing much, really—quite shallow.) She had wanted them to come with her but Sam had said, “You know your mother can’t climb.”
“You run,” Sara had said. “Come back and tell us all about it.” She was dressed up. A black taffeta skirt that spread in a circle around her on the grass. Those were called ballerina skirts.
It must have been a special day.
Juliet asked Sam about this when he came out of the store. At first he could not remember. Then he did. A gyp joint, he said. He didn’t know when it had disappeared.
Juliet could see no trace anywhere along the street of a fountain or a teahouse.
“A bringer of peace and order,” Sam said, and it took a moment for her to recognize that he was still talking about Irene. “She’ll turn her hand to anything. Cut the grass and hoe the garden. Whatever she’s doing she gives it her best and she behaves as if it’s a privilege to do it. That’s what never ceases to amaze me.”
What could the carefree occasion have been? A birthday, a wedding anniversary?
Sam spoke insistently, even solemnly, over the noise of the car’s struggle up the hill.
“She restored my faith in women.”
Sam charged into every store after telling Juliet that he wouldn’t be a minute, and came back to the car quite a while later explaining that he had not been able to get away. People wanted to talk, people had been saving up jokes to tell him. A few followed him out to see his daughter and her baby.
“So that’s the girl who talks Latin,” one woman said.
“Getting a bit rusty nowadays,” Sam said. “Nowadays she has her hands full.”
“I bet,” the woman said, craning to get a look at Penelope. “But aren’t they a blessing? Oh, the wee ones.”
Juliet had thought she might talk to Sam about the thesis she was planning to return to—though at present that was just a dream. Such subjects used to come up naturally between them. Not with Sara. Sara would say, “Now, you must tell me what you’re doing in your studies,” and Juliet would sum things up, and Sara might ask her how she kept all those Greek names straight. But Sam had known what she was talking about. At college she had mentioned how her father had explained to her what thaumaturgy meant, when she ran across the word at the age of twelve or thirteen. She was asked if her father was a scholar.
“Sure,” she said. “He teaches Grade Six.”
Now she had a feeling that he would subtly try to undermine her. Or maybe not so subtly. He might use the word airy-fairy. Or claim to have forgotten things she could not believe he had forgotten.
But maybe he had. Rooms in his mind closed up, the windows blackened—what was in there judged by him to be too useless, too discreditable, to meet the light of day.
Juliet spoke out more harshly than she intended.
“Does she want to get married? Irene?”
This question startled Sam, coming as it did in that tone and after a considerable silence.
“I don’t know,” he said.
And after a moment, “I don’t see how she could.”
“Ask her,” Juliet said. “You must want to, the way you feel about her.”
They drove for a mile or two before he spoke. It was clear she had given offense.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Happy, Grumpy, Dopey, Sleepy, Sneezy,” Sara said.
“Doc,” said Juliet.
“Doc. Doc. Happy, Sneezy, Doc, Grumpy, Bashful, Sneezy— No. Sneezy, Bashful, Doc, Grumpy—Sleepy, Happy, Doc, Bashful—”
Having counted on her fingers, Sara said, “Wasn’t that eight?
“We went there more than once,” she said. “We used to call it the Shrine of Strawberry Shortcake—oh, how I’d like to go again.”
“Well, there’s nothing there,” Juliet said. “I couldn’t even see where it was.”
“I’m sure I could have. Why didn’t I go with you? A summer drive. What strength does it take to ride in a car? Daddy’s always saying I haven’t the strength.”
“You came to meet me.”
“Yes I did,” said Sara. “But he didn’t want me to. I had to throw a fit.”
She reached around to pull up the pillows behind her head, but she could not manage it, so Juliet did it for her.
“Drat,” said Sara. “What a useless piece of goods I am. I think I could handle a bath, though. What if company comes?”
Juliet asked if she was expecting anybody.
“No. But what if?”
So Juliet took her into the bathroom and Penelope crawled after them. Then when the water was ready and her grand-mother hoisted in, Penelope decided that the bath must be for her as well. Juliet undressed her, and the baby and the old woman were bathed together. Though Sara, naked, did not look like an old woman as much as an old girl—a girl, say, who had suffered some exotic, wasting, desiccating disease.
Penelope accepted her presence without alarm, but kept a firm hold on her own duck-shaped yellow soap.
It was in the bath that Sara finally brought herself to ask, circumspectly, about Eric.
“I’m sure he is a nice man,” she said.
“Sometimes,” said Juliet casually.
“He was so good to his first wife.”
“Only wife,” Juliet corrected her. “So far.”
“But I’m sure now you have this baby—you’re happy, I mean. I’m sure you’re happy.”
“As happy as is consistent with living in sin,” Juliet said, surprising her mother by wringing out a dripping washcloth over her soaped head.
“That’s what I mean,” said Sara after ducking and covering her face, with a joyful shriek. Then, “Juliet?”
“Yes?”
“You know I don’t mean it if I ever say mean things about Daddy. I know he loves me. He’s just unhappy.”
Juliet dreamed she was a child again and in this house, though the arrangement of the rooms was somewhat different. She looked out the window of one of the unfamiliar rooms, and saw an arc of water sparkling in the air. This water came from the hose. Her father, with his back to her, was watering the garden. A figure moved in and out among the raspberry canes and was revealed, after a while, to be Irene—though a more childish Irene, supple and merry. She was dodging the water sprinkled from the hose. Hiding, reappearing, mostly successful but always caught again for an instant before she ran away. The game was supposed to be lighthearted, but Juliet, behind the window, watched it with disgust. Her father always kept his back to her, yet she believed—she somehow saw—that he held the hose low, in front of his body, and that it was only the nozzle of it that he turned back and forth.
The dream was suffused with a sticky horror. Not the kind of horror that jostles its shapes outside your skin, but the kind that curls through the narrowest passages of your blood.
When she woke that feeling was still with her. She found the dream shameful. Obvious, banal. A dirty indulgence of her own.
There was a knock on the front door in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody used the front door—Juliet found it a bit stiff to open.
The man who stood there wore a well-pressed yellow shirt with short sleeves, and tan pants. He was perhaps a few years older than she was, tall but rather frail-looking, slightly hollowchested, but vigorous in his greeting, relentless in his smiling.
“I’ve come to see the lady of the house,” he said.
Juliet left him standing there and went into the sunroom.
“There’s a man at the door,” she said. “He might be selling something. Should I get rid of him?”
Sara was pushing herself up. “No, no,” she said breathlessly. “Tidy me a bit, can you? I heard his voice. It’s Don. It’s my friend Don.”
Don had already entered the house and was heard outside the sunroom door.
“No fuss, Sara. It’s only me. Are you decent?”
Sara, with a wild and happy look, reached for the hairbrush she could not manage, then gave up and ran her fingers through her hair. Her voice rang out gaily. “I’m as decent as I’ll ever be, I’m afraid. Come in here.”
The man appeared, hurried up to her, and she lifted her arms to him. “You smell of summer,” she said. “What is it?” She fingered his shirt. “Ironing. Ironed cotton. My, that’s nice.”
“I did it myself,” he said. “Sally’s over at the church messing about with the flowers. Not a bad job, eh?”
“Lovely,” said Sara. “But you almost didn’t get in. Juliet thought you were a salesman. Juliet’s my daughter. My dear daughter. I told you, didn’t I? I told you she was coming. Don is my minister, Juliet. My friend and minister.”
Don straightened up, grasped Juliet’s hand.
“Good you’re here—I’m very glad to meet you. And you weren’t so far wrong, actually. I am a sort of salesman.”
Juliet smiled politely at the ministerial joke.
“What church are you the minister of?”
The question made Sara laugh. “Oh dear—that gives the show away, doesn’t it?”
“I’m from Trinity,” said Don, with his unfazed smile. “And as for giving the show away—it’s no news to me that Sara and Sam were not involved with any of the churches in the community. I just started dropping in anyway, because your mother is such a charming lady.”
Juliet could not remember whether it was the Anglican or United Church that was called Trinity.
“Would you get Don a reasonable sort of chair, dear?” said Sara. “Here he is bending over me like a stork. And some sort of refreshment, Don? Would you like an eggnog? Juliet makes me the most delicious eggnogs. No. No, that’s probably too heavy. You’ve just come in from the heat of the day. Tea? That’s hot too. Ginger ale? Some kind of juice? What juice do we have, Juliet?”
Don said, “I don’t need anything but a glass of water. That would be welcome.”
“No tea? Really?” Sara was quite out of breath. “But I think I’d like some. You could drink half a cup, surely. Juliet?”
In the kitchen, by herself—Irene could be seen in the garden, today she was hoeing around the beans—Juliet wondered if the tea was a ruse to get her out of the room for a few private words. A few private words, perhaps even a few words of prayer? The notion sickened her.
Sam and Sara had never belonged to any church, though Sam had told someone, early in their life here, that they were Druids. Word had gone around that they belonged to a church not represented in town, and that information had moved them up a notch from having no religion at all. Juliet herself had gone to Sunday school for a while at the Anglican Church, though that was mostly because she had an Anglican friend. Sam, at school, had never rebelled at having to read the Bible and say the Lord’s Prayer every morning, any more than he objected to “God Save the Queen.”
“There’s times for sticking your neck out and times not to,” he had said. “You satisfy them this way, maybe you can get away with telling the kids a few facts about evolution.”
Sara had at one time been interested in the Baha’i faith, but Juliet believed that this interest had waned.
She made enough tea for the three of them and found some digestive biscuits in the cupboard—also the brass tray which Sara had usually taken out for fancy occasions.
Don accepted a cup, and gulped down the ice water which she had remembered to bring him, but shook his head at the cookies.
“Not for me, thanks.”
He seemed to say this with special emphasis. As if godliness forbade him.
He asked Juliet where she lived, what was the nature of the weather on the west coast, what work her husband did.
“He’s a prawn fisherman, but he’s actually not my husband,” said Juliet pleasantly.
Don nodded. Ah, yes.
“Rough seas out there?”
“Sometimes.”
“Whale Bay. I’ve never heard of it but now I’ll remember it. What church do you go to in Whale Bay?”
“We don’t go. We don’t go to church.”
“Is there not a church of your sort handy?”
Smiling, Juliet shook her head.
“There is no church of our sort. We don’t believe in God.”
Don’s cup made a little clatter as he set it down in its saucer. He said he was sorry to hear that.
“Truly sorry to hear that. How long have you been of this opinion?”
“I don’t know. Ever since I gave it any serious thought.”
“And your mother’s told me you have a child. You have a little girl, don’t you?”
Juliet said yes, she had.
“And she has never been christened? You intend to bring her up a heathen?”
Juliet said that she expected Penelope would make up her own mind about that, someday.
“But we intend to bring her up without religion. Yes.”
“That is sad,” said Don quietly. “For yourselves, it ’s sad. You and your—whatever you call him—you’ve decided to reject God’s grace. Well. You are adults. But to reject it for your child—it’s like denying her nourishment.”
Juliet felt her composure cracking. “But we don’t believe, ” she said. “We don’t believe in God’s grace. It’s not like denying her nourishment, it’s refusing to bring her up on lies.”
“Lies. What millions of people all over the world believe in, you call lies. Don’t you think that’s a little presumptuous of you, calling God a lie?”
“Millions of people don’t believe it, they just go to church,” said Juliet, her voice heating. “They just don’t think. If there is a God, then God gave me a mind, and didn’t he intend me to use it?
“Also,” she said, trying to hold herself steady. “Also, millions of people believe something different. They believe in Buddha, for instance. So how does millions of people believing in anything make it true?”
“Christ is alive,” said Don readily. “Buddha isn’t.”
“That’s just something to say. What does it mean? I don’t see any proof of either one being alive, as far as that goes.”
“You don’t. But others do. Do you know that Henry Ford— Henry Ford the second, who has everything anybody in life could desire—nevertheless he gets down on his knees and prays to God every night of his life?”
“Henry Ford?” cried Juliet. “Henry Ford? What does anything Henry Ford does matter to me?”
The argument was taking the course that arguments of this sort are bound to take. The minister’s voice, which had started out more sorrowful than angry—though always indicating ironclad conviction—was taking on a shrill and scolding tone, while Juliet, who had begun, as she thought, in reasonable resistance— calm, shrewd, rather maddeningly polite—was now in a cold and biting rage. Both of them cast around for arguments and refutations that would be more insulting than useful.
Meanwhile Sara nibbled on a digestive biscuit, not looking up at them. Now and then she shivered, as if their words struck her, but they were beyond noticing.
What did bring their display to an end was the loud wailing of Penelope, who had wakened wet and had complained softly for a while, then complained more vigorously, and finally given way to fury. Sara heard her first, and tried to attract their attention.
“Penelope,” she said faintly, then, with more effort, “Juliet. Penelope.” Juliet and the minister both looked at her distractedly, and then the minister said, with a sudden drop in his voice, “Your baby.”
Juliet hurried from the room. She was shaking when she picked Penelope up, she came close to stabbing her when she was pinning on the dry diaper. Penelope stopped crying, not because she was comforted but because she was alarmed by this rough attention. Her wide wet eyes, her astonished stare, broke into Juliet’s preoccupation, and she tried to settle herself down, talking as gently as she could and then picking her child up, walking with her up and down the upstairs hall. Penelope was not immediately reassured, but after a few minutes the tension began to leave her body.
Juliet felt the same thing happening to her, and when she thought that a certain amount of control and quiet had returned to both of them, she carried Penelope downstairs.
The minister had come out of Sara’s room and was waiting for her. In a voice that might have been contrite, but seemed in fact frightened, he said, “That’s a nice baby.”
Juliet said, “Thank you.”
She thought that now they might properly say good-bye, but something was holding him. He continued to look at her, he did not move away. He put his hand out as if to catch hold of her shoulder, then dropped it.
“Do you know if you have—,” he said, then shook his head slightly. The have had come out sounding like hab.
“Jooze,” he said, and slapped his hand against his throat. He waved in the direction of the kitchen.
Juliet’s first thought was that he must be drunk. His head was wagging slightly back and forth, his eyes seemed to be filmed over. Had he come here drunk, had he brought something in his pocket? Then she remembered. A girl, a pupil at the school where she had once taught for half a year. This girl, a diabetic, would suffer a kind of seizure, become thick-tongued, distraught, staggering, if she had gone too long without food.
Shifting Penelope to her hip, she took hold of his arm and steadied him along towards the kitchen. Juice. That was what they had given the girl, that was what he was talking about.
“Just a minute, just a minute, you’ll be all right,” she said. He held himself upright, hands pressed down on the counter, head lowered.
There was no orange juice—she remembered giving Penelope the last of it that morning, thinking she must get more. But there was a bottle of grape soda, which Sam and Irene liked to drink when they came in from work in the garden.
“Here,” she said. Managing with one hand, as she was used to doing, she poured out a glassful. “Here.” And as he drank she said, “I’m sorry there’s no juice. But it’s the sugar, isn’t it? You have to get some sugar?”
He drank it down, he said, “Yeah. Sugar. Thanks.” Already his voice was clearing. She remembered this too, about the girl at the school—how quick and apparently miraculous the recovery. But before he was quite recovered, or quite himself, while he was still holding his head at a slant, he met her eyes. Not on purpose, it seemed, just by chance. The look in his eyes was not grateful, or forgiving—it was not really personal, it was just the raw look of an astounded animal, hanging on to whatever it could find.
And within a few seconds the eyes, the face, became the face of the man, the minister, who set down his glass and without another word fled out of the house.
Sara was either asleep or pretending to be, when Juliet went to pick up the tea tray. Her sleeping state, her dozing state, and her waking state had now such delicate and shifting boundaries that it was hard to identify them. At any rate, she spoke, she said in little more than a whisper, “Juliet?”
Juliet paused in the doorway.
“You must think Don is—rather a simpleton,” Sara said. “But he isn’t well. He’s a diabetic. It’s serious.”
Juliet said, “Yes.”
“He needs his faith.”
“Foxhole argument,” said Juliet, but quietly, and perhaps Sara did not hear, for she went on talking.
“My faith isn’t so simple,” said Sara, her voice all shaky (and seeming to Juliet, at this moment, strategically pathetic). “I can’t describe it. But it’s—all I can say—it’s something. It’s a— wonderful—something. When it gets really bad for me—when it gets so bad I—you know what I think then? I think, all right. I think— Soon. Soon I’ll see Juliet.”
Dreaded (Dearest) Eric,
Where to begin? I am fine and Penelope is fine. Considering. She walks confidently now around Sara’s bed but is still leery of striking out with no support. The summer heat is amazing, compared with the west coast. Even when it rains. It’s a good thing it does rain because Sam is going full-tilt at the market garden business. The other day I rode around with him in the ancient vehicle delivering fresh raspberries and raspberry jam (made by a sort of junior Ilse Koch person who inhabits our kitchen) and newly dug first potatoes of the season. He is quite gungho. Sara stays in bed and dozes or looks at outdated fashion magazines. A minister came to visit her and he and I got into a big stupid row about the existence of God or some such hot topic. The visit is going okay though . . .
This was a letter that Juliet found years later. Eric must have saved it by accident—it had no particular importance in their lives.
She had gone back to the house of her childhood once more, for Sara’s funeral, some months after that letter was written. Irene was no longer around, and Juliet had no memory of asking or being told where she was. Most probably she had married. As Sam did again, in a couple of years. He married a fellow teacher, a good-natured, handsome, competent woman. They lived in her house—Sam tore down the house where he and Sara had lived, and extended the garden. When his wife retired, they bought a trailer and began to go on long winter trips. They visited Juliet twice at Whale Bay. Eric took them out in his boat. He and Sam got along well. As Sam said, like a house afire.
When she read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some past fabricated self. She wondered at the sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories. Then she thought that some shift must have taken place, at that time, which she had not remembered. Some shift concerning where home was. Not at Whale Bay with Eric but back where it had been before, all her life before.
Because it’s what happens at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can.
But she had not protected Sara. When Sara had said, soon I’ll see Juliet, Juliet had found no reply. Could it not have been managed? Why should it have been so difficult? Just to say Yes. To Sara it would have meant so much—to herself, surely, so little. But she had turned away, she had carried the tray to the kitchen, and there she washed and dried the cups and also the glass that had held grape soda. She had put everything away.