WHEN SHE LOOKED back at the wedding, which happened thirty-seven years ago, Rowena remembered that it was mostly okay. For one thing, no one said anything mean to her, and Jimmy was kind the whole time. He wasn’t always like that, he could have got that glazed look on his face, moody. Even better, no one there saw that she was three months along, despite the fact that she was skinny as a rabbit. She had to work some to pull on that white dress. Then her mother said to her, “Don’t stand sideways. Say hello straight on, that’s the trick.” Rowena stood by the window and looked out at the hills, at the snow. The snow had fallen overnight and it looked soft, wet and heavy, like it would melt.
For their first anniversary, it was a ring that he gave to her. She remembered how they were at the restaurant down by the harbour. He reached into his pocket and took it out, a little gold circle with a diamond. There it was.
“Hey,” he said, “what’s this, look at this.”
There was no box around it, he had it held in his fingertips.
“Oh thanks,” she said, “thanks, sweetheart, but this is way too much for me.”
“No no,” he said, “this is for you, you’re the best.”
“But the first one’s paper,” she said, “the first anniversary, like you get a card, a party hat, that’s all, nothing like this. Then, the second year it’s straw, then leather.”
“Paper?” he said, “That’s for them with no money. Hold it by the light, it’s real. Real diamonds. Take it in and check.”
Then they finished off the berry crumble.
Next year, he turned off the TV.
“Time for us,” he said, “time for us.”
So, up the hill where they lived, she put the baby to bed. Laid her down like a chalice and backed up tippy-toe. Colic. That’d be the last straw if she woke up now, twisted her little face and cried. It was all nerve wracking for her, nothing seemed simple. Maybe it wasn’t colic, maybe it was something worse.
The third year, they liked to dance, so it was natural to go with the leather pants they both got on Water Street. Those pants shone better under the lights, black ones, they rubbed like skin. Quite a problem in the ladies’ though, they turned out, what with all the tight peeling off and peeling down and the zipper that jammed up or down or, even worse, half-way one way or the other, going nowhere. That’s why they make blue jeans, they figured one night, when they got home laughing. It was better now, their life together, it was going in the opposite direction of most.
For their fourth year, he brought flowers home from the high meadow. Nothing special, they were low and white with shiny green leaves, and all he did was put them in a glass of water on the table. The flowers were so small, they had no real stems, they floated around in the glass like they were on the move. There was a smudge on the glass, little whorls, so she wiped them off like a criminal would do, if there was a crime of any kind, and moved them dead-centre.
The next year, he was out cutting wood when she heard a thump, and then he came through the kitchen door. He held one hand in the other hand and there was blood under the handkerchief.
“Damn,” he said.
“Quick, Jimmy,” she said, “let me see that, sit down. There’s a sharp piece of wood there, sticking right in.”
“Take it out,” he said.
She ran and got the pliers and grabbed the piece of wood and pulled it out, so fast her fingers got slippery with blood. It was an inch long, the piece of wood.
“Thanks, darling,” he said, “you’re the best.”
She washed off her hands in the sink.
“You’re my sliver girl,” he said, “that’s what you are.”
Year six: she tucked the shirtsleeves over the pointed part of the board, and moved the iron around and around, and when she started out doing that, she watched the soaps on TV. Scorches? Those were the little areas of brown that showed up at the sad parts, there wasn’t much you could do about that.
“Use the sprayer,” her sister said, “use it more than that, cool it off. Touch the iron like that, wet your fingers, they won’t burn if you’re real fast.”
So she did that and she got a lot better with the iron.
“Where’d the scorches go?” they all said.
She sprayed Maddy too when she got home, even on the cold foggy days. It got to be part of the games they played, six years in.
Year seven wasn’t so nice. He came home at 3 a.m.
“Jimmy,” she said, “I know she was there, you can’t pull the wool over my eyes. Get out and go with your party girl.”
She stood in the kitchen with one hand on the counter and then Maddy was there with bug eyes. He put his hand on her arm and looked guilty. There wasn’t a lot she had to do. Without the two of them, he’d flip right out, she had him there.
“Get out, go,” she said, but instead of that, he sat down in the armchair like the sag of misery he was, and he drummed his fingers up and down.
“Nothing happened,” he said.
She didn’t want this in her life, no way, so she put the hammer down. Lucky thing was, that was it.
For the eighth anniversary, he went out and got the baby boots bronzed.
“How’d you think of that?” she said.
“Eight years, it’s bronze,” he said, “so I figured, try the trophy store.”
He was right. The window there was half-full of baby shoes that looked like caramel now, butterscotch with dust all over.
The guy in the store said, “The ones in the window, they’re half-price, nobody showed up for them.”
“But those are not mine,” he said, “those are not Maddy’s shoes.”
“Well, the wife, she’ll never know that,” the man said, “it saves us both time and money, take two pair, I don’t care.”
“Two pair?”
“Sure go ahead. By the by, this here’s a good business if you like.”
“Good business?”
“Real good. Makes money, makes people happy. Trophies, bronze boots, what’s better than that?”
He was the only customer in the store so all he did was order Maddy’s boots, bronzed, and when he came back to get them, he also bought an old trophy for himself that said First Place, Husbands.
On their ninth anniversary, they went shopping.
“There’s always something nice about pottery,” she said, “look at the glazes.” They were at the east end of Duckworth Street. All he could smell was flowery soap and beeswax and the lavender, if that’s what it was, in the little bags. There were small price tags on everything.
“You like the teapot?” he said.
“That’s the one, I like the glaze on that one, not so shiny.”
“Eighty-five dollars,” he said, “that’s a lot of money for a teapot.”
“It’s the only one like it,” she said, “it’d be ours, only forty dollars each, really.” Well, that made sense to him, that’s not a bad deal at all.
“Done,” he said.
He picked it up and put his fingers through the handle. It had real good balance, it wouldn’t be easy to drop that one on the floor into twenty pieces, scattered through the kitchen like a bomb went off.
Tin ceiling? Sure, look at that. There was a time all the stores were like that downtown, before the fires and the codes and the dropped ceilings low enough to make you sick, but that’s beside the point.
“You could have an art gallery here,” he said, “Rowena, some kind of store for selling. Paint all you like in the back, wear your smock, have a foghorn or a bell on the door. Why not? Here’s where the tourists go by, that’s where they get on the bus for the Hill.”
“But it’s a restaurant,” she said.
“With food like this,” he said, “it’s not going to be a restaurant for long. This place is going under, you can feel it.”
He was right, the waitress was lost in some kind of conversation on the phone in the corner.
“She crying? I hope not,” he said, “you got to learn to keep yourself together at work.”
They ordered food from the kitchen. You could see the cook was bored, he looked out through the porthole. They ate the fish, the vegetables. It was their tenth anniversary, the baby-sitter with the Russian name, Sonja, the one with an accent, was back home with Madeleine, so there was no worry there.
He noticed the ad in the Telegram under Vintage Cars. He dialed up the number and the guy said, “Come on over, you’re the third one.”
“It’s a Studebaker Silver Hawk?” he asked.
“It’s a Silver Hawk, like brand new.”
When he got there, all he could think was, wow, that’s a lot of steel, turquoise like turquoise colour can only be on cars like that, better than in real life, and the grill had the highest shine. Not a fingerprint anywhere. He opened up the hood and he backed off and he saw his father looking in.
“How much is this?”
“Eight thousand dollars, no more no less and there’s others coming.”
“Sold,” he said, “that’s for my wife on our anniversary.”
“Oh, the wife likes cars, vintage cars?”
“Not yet,” he said, “but she’s going to like this one the moment she sets her eyes on it, guaranteed.”
Then they took four years off. There were no presents at all, the budget was blown sky high and it wasn’t easy to forget. The Studebaker filled the whole garage, and the bicycles and the lawnmower and the ladders all got stacked outside in the rain till he put up the wooden shed he bought from the tire store. She never took to that big car at all.
“Look, it’s the colour of your eyes,” he said.
She never drove it, not once.
“Look at your face in the grill,” he said, “how pretty you look in that grill.”
What nonsense that was, her face was swelled and distorted and bent in and out like a side-show mirror.
“Don’t scratch the car for God’s sake,” he said, “watch your buttons, when you go by.”
So they passed the silk year, the lace year, the ivory year, one by one unrecognized but for the turquoise-blue monster Studebaker that they took out on Sundays. What’d they do? They drove it as far as Butter Pot and she had to admit, there was lots of room in that car for a picnic basket. There was even more room when Maddy quit coming. She liked her friends better, she wore blue eye shadow all the time.
For their fifteenth anniversary, they lay awake and waited for the phone to ring. Maddy was real good about that, about phoning.
“Mommy, I’m staying over at Ally’s, we’re doing homework.”
“Okay honey, that’s good, can I speak to Ally’s mother?”
“She’s out to Bingo.”
That sort of thing, it was sort of reassuring if you only thought with your heart instead of your brains. They could fall asleep but they were fools. Then Maddy didn’t phone and they had to get up in the middle of the night.
“Go look for her, Jimmy,” she said.
He drove all the way downtown.
“Don’t lock the door,” he said when he left.
There she was in the doughnut shop. No, that’s not her. That’s her. That’s not her. That’s her. Jimmy went in and Maddy came back out with him at two in the morning and they went home. Sullen, she was. It didn’t make any sense, there was nothing they could do, there was no cause for this. They lay in bed and they saw Maddy all alone on some street in Halifax, somewhere they’d never been, Maddy still thinking she was some kind of Queen of the Ball.
The china anniversary, the twentieth year, by now all of that was blown over with Madeleine and she was back at school. She was fine. She had a boyfriend, Clyde Grandy. All her glitter makeup was thrown in the garbage can and gone.
“I think I’ll sell the car, Rowena,” he said.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“We could use the money for something better, this is twenty years.”
So he put his own ad in the paper and a guy came by and bought the car right off. “I sure loves this car, that colour,” the guy said, “wait till the Missus sees this.”
“Yes, just you wait,” said Jimmy.
Then he went out and picked up the china servings, from the antique store. She’d already gone and made the choice.
“Don’t drop it,” the man said, “they break easy.”
“But they’re a hundred years old,” said Jimmy, “they’ve been through lots.”
“They break easy,” the man said again, “china’s like that.”
On the way home, he drove slowly over the bumps, instead of pretending he could fly.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary he said, “There’s no way we’ll make fifty, that’s rare.”
“But they’re in the paper all the time,” she said, “we can hope for that too, just like they did.”
“Okay,” he said, “that’s true, why not.”
He bought her a silver brooch without her help.
Hey, she thought, he’s getting better and better all the time at this.
One night in the thirty-seventh year of their marriage he woke up and said to her, “I got this headache.”
He was covered in sweat. She got up and drove him to the hospital.
“He’s fine,” they said, in the Emergency Department, “but we’ll keep him here a bit, make sure.”
“Good,” she said, “that’s good, I’ll go home, get his things.”
“He’ll be on the second floor,” they said.
The phone rang when she was still at home.
“He’s passed away,” they said.
“What?”
“It happened so fast, my dear, there was nothing we could do, there was no suffering for him, no more than if he’d been in Halifax or Montreal, that we promise you.”
All she could say was “Thanks, thanks for calling me.”
What a thing to say, she thought later. She hung up the phone and put the bag down, the one with his pajamas.
Bury him in Mount Pearl? “No way,” said Maddy, and they all agreed with her. They took him home to Belleoram in one of those hearses. The ground was still frozen. His brothers, the ones that were left, piled up tires in the old cemetery high on the hill, and they poured on spurts of gasoline, and they lit the match. The fire went on for hours. There were black lashings of smoke that crept and spilled across the Reach as far as Iron Skull, caught by the wind that would never stop that time of winter. The ground unfroze and they dug the grave. With thick gloves, four of them lowered the coffin down by ropes. She counted them up, seventeen people in all were there. The earth still smelled of burnt rubber, so she moved upwind to where Maddy was, standing there with her cousins, with Flo and Eunice, all three of them clinging together, dressed in black like crows. There was no choir of Angels and the sun never broke through the clouds. Clyde Grandy read a poem.
What kind of marriage was this anyway, everybody at the graveside wondered. Better than mine, better than yours? The same or different? It couldn’t have been worse than the three of mine, one of them thought. Another said, they muddled through like we did. They were okay, they were nice as kids, they weren’t wild. Now what’s she going to do alone, there’s room for me, another said to himself. Or: I don’t know what to say about this. Or: Oh, she was sure pretty back then, look at her now, look at us all here in this sorry crowd. Finally: I could use a drink, my toes are gone as numb as the one in the casket there.
As for Maddy, she thought, they had a love like none she’d ever seen, the best. Maddy was the only one who really knew, the one that could be trusted. She was their witness. She was there for all the times, all the good, the bad, the useless times, the times between all those memory times, the nothing times, the times that added up to all their lives together. And the funny thing was, through it all, no one really seemed to reach out to make anything happen. It just did, it had a life of its own. That’s how it was for them, for all of them, even after he died.