How I hate this place! I can’t stand the sound of the waves crashing, and the hevyness when the water is still. Water and sky and sand—there’s nothing else up here, nothing to keep me from thinking. I wish, how I wish we were girls again—things were hard then, but we could hope for anything. But we went and got married, and now there’s nothing but the ever-after. Children keep coming, days keep passing, but I’m not alive any more—my life has stopped. Oh, why did we come here at all, Olya, was it only for this? If I could wish myself back to the Old Place, the way it used to be, I’d go in a minute. I swear it. I’d leave it all behind, husband and house and even, God help me, the children. Sometimes I catch myself looking at them at the brekfast table, seeing them at the bottom of the lake. All four of them in a row, holding hands and sitting still, so still, the waves lifting their hair, ruffling the frills of their bading suits …
Sonia Martyn is staring at the empty place on the mantel, where a small plaster statue used to stand. She looks down at what she’s just written; crumples it in her fist, but this isn’t good enough. She takes the ball of paper to the fieldstone fireplace. In her thin pyjamas measled with roses she hunkers down and lights a match. The letter flares up, quick and bright as tears, then falls into ash. She stabs it with the poker till it breaks into small, bitter flakes. In the thriller Sasha’s loaned her, a detective is able to piece together a letter that the murderer burned in a grate, picking up the charred pieces with tweezers: Sonia isn’t taking any chances.
Dear Olya,
I hope things are going well for you and Walter in the city. Everything’s fine here, no need to worry about anything. Darka’s a big help with the children and she makes herself useful with cooking and cleening, too. You’ll be happy to know she’s settled down. Of course it’s so quiet here—not much going on for a girl of her age, thank heven. Only two more weeks and the summer will be over, and we’ll bring her back to you, safe and sound.
It’s not yet six; she should go back to bed. Outside, the air is misty, as if someone’s poured cream into the sky, though the sun’s already scraping at the edges. Another fine, bright, endless day. Sonia opens the kitchen door, examining the shadfly skeletons still hooked into the screen, bleached ghosts of the insects that shed them. How, she wonders, do they crawl out so cleanly, leaving behind this perfect trace of their bodies, even the legs, thinner than eyelashes? Do they miss their old selves, do they ever mistake their cast-off bodies for some long-lost friend, or forgotten twin? She doesn’t dare step out onto the porch: she’s afraid the hinge will squeak as it always does and waken Darka. A bad idea, giving her that poky room across from the kitchen. They would have put her in the sleep-house across the lawn, except that Sonia had promised Olya to keep both eyes on her daughter.
Olya, her best friend before their marriages: they hardly saw one another now, living as they did at opposite ends of the city, and in such different circumstances. For Olya had married Walter, a cutter at Canada Packers—had had to get married, while Sonia had bided her time until what they used to call “the right man” came along, a man with a profession, a future ahead of him. That future had turned out to contain, on his side, endless work at the office, and on hers, four children to raise. Walter Marchuk may have been as busy at the plant as Max Martyn was at his law office, but while Sonia was struggling with diapers and baby carriages and booster shots for her brood, Olya, who’d had only the one child, spent her time cleaning the houses of women who lived in suburbs similar to Sonia’s, but who had names like Brenda and Patty and Joan. For Max and Sonia had moved from downtown to a big house in a development that had been farmland ten years ago. Whereupon Olya had found excuses not to take up Sonia’s invitations to visit, and had stopped inviting the Martyns over for sloppy joes or lazy holubtsi at the duplex on Bathurst. It was Olya’s pride, Sonia’s mother had said; there was no forcing a friendship past the point of such pride. So now the Martyns and the Marchuks saw each other once a year, at the Martyns’ shabby cottage at Kalyna Beach, where Olya and Sonia would cook together and reminisce about their immigrant girlhoods, pretending things were just as they’d been before husbands had hove into view, before addresses and occupations had started to matter.
Sonia had promised to take Darka for the summer, see her through a difficult patch (she was driving Olya crazy): allow her to earn some pocket money, teach her some housekeeping skills—and keep her out of harm’s way. This last part of the promise had been broken their very first night at the cottage. How could Sonia have known what Darka would get up to, disappearing into the bathroom once everyone else was in bed, experimenting with a jar of peroxide bleach she’d smuggled up in her suitcase? Max had had to buy a box of Miss Clairol (Basic Brown) so that Darka’s hair could be dyed back again, at summer’s end. Olya and Walter need never find out—but this turns Sonia into a traitor as well as a liar, as far as she can see. For this is the first summer that the Martyns have failed to invite the Marchuks up for a weekend. Darka has made it a condition of her staying on in this hole-in-the-wall at the edge of nowhere. She’s promised not to hitch a ride into Midland and from there, back to the city, on two conditions: that Sonia let her live this summer as a blonde, and that Olya and Walter be kept in the dark.
Sonia puts her hands to her face, rubbing her eyes with her fingertips. Another half-hour’s sleep might make all the difference between a good and a bad day, between drifting or dragging herself through the duties required of her, but it’s so peaceful when she’s the only one awake, the children cocooned, still, in their dreams. With the irresponsibility of a ghost she glides from room to room, watching her daughters sleep: Laura and Bonnie in the shady, sunken bedroom off the screened-in porch; Katia and Baby Alix in the sunny room across from her own. Opening the doors so softly, imagining herself all tenderness, beautifully good, like the Blue Fairy in the movie of Pinocchio. They are all of them so beautiful, so good when they are fast asleep, whatever wounds they’ve got or given healing gently, as if without scars. She loves them so, she could be such a wonderful mother if only her children were always still like this, and lying sleeping.
On her night table, like a corpse waiting to be discovered, lies the paperback she’d sat up reading until two. She shoves Death by Desire into the drawer, to the very back, where no one will find it unless he’s looking for it. Now the night table’s all innocence, showing the nicks in the dull-white paint, paint thick like her own skin, skin of a thirty-nine-year-old woman who’s had too many children too quickly. Bare, dull-white paint with something marring the finish—a bead broken off a dress: if she were in the city right now she’d say a small, jet bead. Though, it’s not black at all, but dark red—she pushes at it with her finger, and legs spring out; it waddles off. Sonechko. The children have another name for it, an English name. They sing a nursery rhyme, too; she knows what the words are but not what they mean. She understands nothing of this childhood she’s given them by this miracle she’s never quite believed in—a new life in a new country. Their skipping games, the poems they learn at school, the cards they make for Christmas, birthdays—foreign territory in which she’ll never be at home. The very idea of a card for a birthday, of wasting something as precious as paper!
Flat on her stomach, face pressed into the dough of the pillow, Sonia plays at suffocation. Tonight Max will arrive with Marta and there’ll be endless rearranging. She’ll have to send Darka to the sleep-house for the week: Katia and Laura can’t be trusted together, they are always at each other’s throats. Why can’t they get on?—if only she’d had a sister, someone to talk with, confide in, how different her life might have been. All the things she could never tell, even to Olya: hurts and shocks from the village in the lost, the long-gone country. Or the most private things, secrets crawling up and down the inside of her skin. How tonight he’ll walk in while she’s sorting dirty laundry for the next day’s wash, will plant a kiss on her neck, and she’ll stiffen; before she says a word he’ll feel her body closing up against him, and it will start all over again. He’ll tell her how exhausted he is, fighting traffic the whole way up, as if he were a front-line soldier. And she’ll answer back, without meaning it to spurt out the way it always does: “Do you think it’s any picnic for me up here, with four kids, and Darka too—I can’t take my eyes off her for a second. And now you bring me your witch of a sister. What am I supposed to do with her? I’ll go to the office and you stay here with her—you look after her and the kids all week, see how you like it.”
And he will, yes, how could it ever be otherwise, he’ll turn away from her in the hallway where she’s getting out the sheets to make up Marta’s bed. He’ll kiss whichever of the children are still awake, take them out on the lawn to look at the stars, not even thinking to ask if she’ll come out with them, because of course she can’t, she has a million things to do before they can all go to sleep for the night. And the children will leap to him like fish, like sunfish to a scrap of bacon, even Laura who loves no one and wallows in her own misery; the children he almost never sees and who love him all the more because of it, more than they’ll ever love her. And then, once she’s got them all into bed—which they’ll fight like little Tatars after the excitement of being out under the stars, laughing and shoving each other till Marta will call out, in her vulture’s croak, “Can’t you keep those children under control?”—then he’ll come to bed at last, smelling of the city and the cigar he’s smoked out on the porch. For the children and the stars are only an excuse to indulge himself. He knows how she hates the stink of cigars.
He’ll undress in the dark, roll in like a driftwood log beside her, the sag in the mattress pushing their bodies together, no matter how hard she tries to keep to her side. Tonight he’ll be too tired, highway-tired, much too tired. But tomorrow, after a day spent fixing the roof or tinkering with the septic system or replacing the rotten wood on the porch steps; after getting too much sun, and putting up with the kids quarrelling over who is to hand him the nails, and who will hold the hammer when he doesn’t need it—then he’ll turn out the lights after they’ve undressed with their backs to one another; he’ll turn to her and she’ll lie there beneath him, good as gold. What else can she do, when you can hear through the skin-thin walls every sigh or cry anyone makes in their sleep?
Max wants a son. Ever since she was pregnant that first time with Laura he’s had the name picked out: his father’s name, Roman. A boy called Roman had followed her home from school all one winter, a skinny, dwarfish boy she couldn’t stand to have near her. Give him his son and he will never bother her again, that’s what it means, his turning to her each Saturday night, his body so heavy it crushes the life from her. And yet no one is a better dancer—so light on his feet, whirling her across the floor as if she were swans-down chased by a summer breeze. She sees herself and her husband like those tiny dolls placed on the top tier of wedding cakes, gliding over the stiff white icing, while all around, people are watching, envying. Law’s such a respectable profession; he’ll go far, all the way to Q.C. Such a handsome man, so distinguished looking in his tuxedo, the spotless white cummerbund, the deep red carnation in his lapel. He would always bring her a gardenia—roses were common, he used to say: she deserved something as rare as she was. A gardenia, a cummerbund—had she really married him for that? And has it really led her to this? A house in the suburbs, a tumbledown summer cottage, a body scarred with stretch marks, like silverfish crawling over her belly and across her thighs: an aging body stranded in the washed-out garden of her pyjamas.
Never mind, she has one sure consolation: her dress for the Senchenkos’ party. She has hidden it away, like the book in the night-table drawer. Sonia tiptoes to the closet, reaching into its soft depths, finding the dress—the gown—by the metallic feel of the fabric. She can hear her mother’s tongue clucking at the clinging folds, the low-cut neck, but as she holds the dress up against herself she is overcome by its sheer gorgeousness, the cloth dropping from her breasts like golden rain. Slippery and cool like rain, her skin drinking in the gold. If she were to step into the dress, study herself in the mirror, move in the clinging fabric as if she were on a runway and about to launch herself on a sea of unknown, admiring eyes … But she resists the lure: she makes herself shove the dress to the very back of the closet; she swears not to look at it again, to try it on, until the night of the Senchenkos’ party, lest she damage its rareness with too much looking.
Sitting on the end of the bed, facing the satin headboard (too good to be thrown out, too soiled to use at home), Sonia counts the waves beating against the shore as if they were knocks at a door she’d double-bolted. She longs for the city—not the vast, empty-seeming suburb where she lives now, but downtown where she used to work: the streetcar sparks and honking of horns, the wholesale fabric sellers on Queen, the roar of sewing machines in the factories on Spadina. Her mother’s house on Dovercourt Road: sitting out on the porch on summer nights, people walking by, calling hello, everyone breathing in the scent of melting chocolate from the Neilson factory nearby. And it doesn’t matter how hot it gets on summer days, how steamy and drenching; in spite of the lake, in spite of Sunnyside pool, no one expects you to jump into the water.
Whereas here, if one of the children were drowning she wouldn’t be able to run in and rescue her. It’s got so bad now that she can’t go down to the water’s edge without the hairs on her arms sticking into her like pins, her fear like a rag in her mouth. Even if all four of them were to plead with her from the bottom of the lake, their arms stretched out, their mouths wide open, she wouldn’t be able to put a foot—not so much as a toe—into the lake to save them.
The children think it must be God’s hand drawing ridges in the sand beneath the water every night. The God whose eye is painted on the dome of the cathedral back in the city: one huge, blue, unshuttable eye, trailing gold and locked in a triangle.
There is no churchgoing at Kalyna Beach: no onion-bulb cathedral, no bishop with a glass eye and thick black veil strung from a pillbox hat high on his terrible grey head. No cross to kiss, no thick, consecrated bread to force down to an empty stomach, no incense smoking from censers in front of the ikon screen with its gold grapevines and glimmering lamps. Here there’s just the bay, what they call “the lake,” though it’s a mere scallop on a gigantic body of water stretching farther north than any of them has ever dreamed of going. The lake and the cottages on the bluff above it, and the tree-tunnelled roads behind them. And the beach, of course, a snaking shore of sand coasting up to dunes with spikes of grass like long, green needles stuck in a cushion.
Sometimes the lake’s a pale blue, cloudy as shards of glass smoothed to pebbles by the waves. Sometimes the lake is orange, rose, peach, after one of the perfectly calm, bright days, when the children have camped out at the beach, except for the naps they’re forced to take in the afternoon, lying in cedar-scented rooms, watching leaf-shadows dart and flicker on the walls. After sunset, when darkness pools in the roofs of the cottages and the cars stranded beside them, the lake becomes the colour of night itself, so that if you were to flout the rules and sneak down for a swim, the children think, you would emerge with skin blue-black, telltale as ink.
But their days are far too full of sun and sand and water for them to think of anything but sleep by the time dark falls. Under the covers of their narrow beds the older ones may read with flashlights, but when they hear the grown-ups yawn and stumble off to sleep, the children finally give in. Letting their eyelids shut at last, they walk out the doors of their dreams to shores where it’s impossible to tell where water ends, and sky begins.
A gilded barge with sails of purple silk and a hundred silver-mounted oars beating through the oiled and snaky waters. Pyramids on either side of her; palm trees like huge green moths overhead. Charmian and Lotos kneeling with jewelled beakers of strawberry juice. Languid under a canopy of cloth of gold, her raven tresses fingered by the breeze raised by her slaves’ ostrich-feather fans, her bosom rising like dough in a mixing bowl, she waits for Marc Antony. Together they will rule the world and found a dynasty of mighty kings and queens.
Sails billowing, oars beating through the waves—but the harder they beat, the clearer it becomes that the barge, far from moving, is stuck in water thick and stiff as week-old Jell-O. She is about to call to her oarsmen to go faster, faster, when the chief slave, who has the face of her younger sister Katia, turns to her with her hands on her hips, saying, “You—Cleopatra? Who do you think you’re kidding? You’ve got no breasts, your hair’s the colour of dirty dishwater, and you wear glasses. Big, ugly, blind-girl glasses!” And then the voice alters: “What on earth do you think you’re doing, spilling strawberry juice all over the clothes I’ve just washed!” For Katia’s taunts have turned into their mother’s exasperated scolding; the billowing cloth of gold is a ripped flap of screen, and waves, not oars, pound at her ears.
It’s still dark when Laura wakes, though she can make out a streak of light at the window, feel it like a tongue against her open eyes, as if she’s got specks in them that have to be licked away. She wants to close her eyes and turn herself back into Cleopatra on her way to Tarsus: if she only tries hard enough, she will be able to shove the light away. But it has woken Bonnie, too; here she is shivering beside her, a corner of the bedsheet clutched in her hands.
“I’m scared, Laura. Please, can I come sleep with you?”
Laura sighs and shoves herself to the edge of the mattress. “All right. If you promise not to kick.”
“I promise. But sometimes I kick and I can’t help it. Tell me a story, Laura, please?”
Bonnie is nine, by which age Laura would never have dreamed of confessing night terrors or daytime fears. Laura is the only one who knows Bonnie’s secret, and she marvels at her small sister’s talents as an actress. Of all the sisters it is Bonnie people describe as open, sunny, just like a little daisy. They know nothing of the monsters lurking in cupboards and drawers, waiting to jump out and grab her the moment it gets dark each night. It’s become a ritual at the cottage for Bonnie to fall asleep next to Laura, who must then lug her back to her own bed and tuck her in as best she can. It’s become a ritual, as well, for Bonnie to crawl back beside Laura as soon as she wakes up each morning. It’s just as bad at home, where Bonnie has a room all to herself, a room Laura has to inspect each night, closing every drawer, shutting the closets, making sure the windows are locked tight.
That night last winter when they’d watched Boris Karloff in Dracula, Bonnie had taken a small pad of coloured notepaper and drawn a cross on every sheet. Then she’d torn them all off and thumbtacked them to the headboard of her bed. Laura’s face burns to remember how cruel she’d been—telling Bonnie that she, Laura, was really Dracula, and that just when Bonnie was drifting off to sleep she would steal to her room and bite her neck till the blood ran dry. What use, then, could paper crosses be? Bonnie had ended up in Laura’s room, burrowing into her bed and pleading, “Even if you are Dracula, won’t you let me sleep with you?” How stricken she had felt and how full of love for the sister who’d so wholly forgiven and forgotten. As if Bonnie really were as carelessly bright as a daisy, and as incapable of resentment or revenge.
Bonnie snuggles as close as she can to Laura, hands clasped over her heart like the Praying Hands on the Easter card someone’s stuck to the wall. Laura doesn’t need her glasses to see the look on her sister’s face, so warm and so golden. If she hates Katia for being quick and clever and pretty, then why doesn’t she hate Bonnie even more, since, though she looks so little like their mother, she is, as everyone says of Sonia, perfectly beautiful? Bonnie has never fought with their mother, nor has she staged the astounding tantrums Katia has—Laura is prone to sulks, instead—yet Laura loves Bonnie with that fierce, selfless love she’d have given to the dog she will never be allowed to have. Because I have enough to do as it is; you can’t even pick up after yourself, how are you going to take care of an animal? It isn’t a toy, you know, I can’t just throw it in a box when you’re tired of playing!
Feeling Laura’s body stiffen beside her, Bonnie unlocks her hands, stroking her sister’s cheek till Laura gives in.
“All right—but just one story, a short one, because I’m still sleepy. I’ll tell you how Caesar arrived in Alexandria after—”
“Not a Cleopatra story, Laura. Tell me the one about Our Mother. When she worked at the Sportswear Factory, and Mr. Streatfield picked her out from all the sewing machine girls.”
Laura sighs: she is as tired of this story as Bonnie is of Cleopatra.
“One morning at Modern Sportswear, the owner, Mr. Streatfield, happened to be walking along when he saw a beautiful young girl behind a sewing machine, and he said to her, ‘You ought to be modelling those shorts instead of sewing them. Come to my office this afternoon, and we’ll see what we can do for you.’ And so Our Mother went to his office with a hatpin hidden in her sleeve—”
“Because Baba Laryssa told her to watch out for men,” Bonnie prompts.
Laura gives a sigh disguised as a yawn, knowing that this time, like all the others, she won’t be allowed to leave anything out. “Because Baba Laryssa always told her, ‘Men are like that,’ and Our Mother would say, ‘Like what?’ and Baba just said, ‘You’ll find out.’”
Bonnie closes her eyes. Laura goes on with the story, wondering all the while how many weeks or months her mother had worked in the sportswear factory before Mr. Streatfield discovered her. Why was he in such a dingy place, if he was such a famous designer? What did the other girls think when he singled their mother out like that? Mr. Streatfield is an old, fat, bald man with yellow-stained fingers, so why would their mother have needed that hatpin? Her mother has never ever struck her, even when she gets so mad her lips go white. How would she have dared stick a hatpin into Mr. Streatfield—and where?
When Laura reaches the part of the story where the handsome lawyer notices Sonia Metelsky’s picture in an ad for Beaver Bakery in the Ukrainian Herald, she waits for a whole minute, listening to Bonnie’s soft breathing weave through the beating of waves on the shore. Gently, Laura disengages her arm, which is falling asleep under the weight of her sister’s head. She lies back on the pillow, shutting her eyes as best she can against the sun that has risen higher and higher with each sentence of the story being told. Crash, crash, crash goes the water—there must be a wind, perhaps a storm’s on its way, although the sun promises another hot, clear day. She loves the sound of the waves breaking; she can never hear it enough. It’s the part of being at the cottage that she misses most when they’re back in the suburbs, in the big split-level house where no one else has lived before, the trees chopped down, and all the grass in patches on the front lawn, sewn together like a quilt.
Across from her lies the white-painted wall, all the cracks and stains that will leap into view when she puts on the glasses that sit on her nose like a fat blue butterfly, glasses that she’s tried and tried to outgrow. When Elizabeth Taylor auditioned for the lead in National Velvet, they told her they wanted someone taller; she went home, grew three inches and got the part. That’s what it says in the Cleopatra Souvenir Booklet: “How she accomplished the trick she doesn’t reveal.” Laura’s parents wouldn’t take her with them to see Cleopatra—they said she’d have to wait until she was older; it wasn’t suitable for children. She’d done everything, crying, pleading, being helpful around the house; she’d even gone to her father as he sat in his den, watching the hockey game: “If you love me you’ll let me see Cleopatra. It’s educational, please Tatu, if you love me you’ll take me with you. I bet you don’t love me, I bet you wish I’d never been born.” But it was the Maple Leafs against the Canadiens and she couldn’t tell whether he hadn’t heard or didn’t want to answer her. She’d never asked him again, and so her parents had gone to Cleopatra without her. When they brought her the Souvenir Booklet she’d thrown it into the wastepaper basket, snatching it out when they’d left her to mope, staying up half the night reading, learning it by heart.
In a low voice, Laura recites the final lines of the story Bonnie has asked her to tell: “And Mr. Streatfield was going to take Our Mother to California, she was going to model a new line of Outdoor Wear, when she met Our Father, and he proposed, and she got married and had us instead.” She wonders, for a moment, if her mother had felt the same despair at giving up California as she herself had felt at not being able to see Cleopatra. And then she frowns, lines forming like staple marks between her eyebrows. She isn’t going to make excuses for her mother: that’s bad strategy; you must never feel sorry for the enemy. Listening to the waves slap against the shore, she turns towards her sister, to the small, warm body that smells so sweetly of soap and sun.
“Darka, leave them, it’s better to let them drip-dry. It’s more”—and here Sonia pauses for a moment—“hygienic”—a word she’s learned from Reader’s Digest.
The children have been fed, the soggy Rice Krispies scraped from cereal bowls into the garbage, and the bowls washed, dried, put away. Sonia’s forever telling Darka not to bother with drying, but will Darka ever listen? She seems to enjoy making Sonia feel guilty—little flutings of guilt like burned pastry-edging on a pie—at how hard Darka’s being forced to work. There are beds to be made, clothes to be scrubbed in the old tin tub down in the cellar, baskets of cotton sheets to wring out. Slaving at the wash while they traipse off to the beach, Darka grumbles to herself, hands reddening as she flaps each piece of laundry before pegging it on the line.
At all of the cottages nearby, children are being sent to collect shovels and pails, beach balls and towels; mothers are gathering blankets and baby oil. Family by family, they begin the processions down from the log and board-and-batten and shingled structures cresting the small bluff over the lake, along the zigzag paths between scrub and saplings, to each day’s brand-new, shimmering bay.
By ten in the morning the sun has sizzled you through—you have to wear flip-flops and goggle-eyed sunglasses, you have to don beach hats with wide brims and fading raffia flowers woven into the straw, remnants from distant honeymoons in Jamaica or the Bahamas. You have to cart coolers filled with lemonade and iced tea, picnic baskets with snacks for the children, calamine lotion for insect stings. And even though you’ve remembered everything you could possibly want or need, and have laden yourself and even the smaller children with bits of that everything to carry down to the water’s edge, something will always be forgotten. Messengers will endlessly ascend and descend the zigzag paths between the beach and the abandoned cottages.
Once they reach the sand, the children run straight to the water, hair flying, arms churning. Their mothers snatch up the very youngest and call the oldest back to spread out the blankets, securing the edges with stones so the wind won’t keep flapping them about, flinging sand into everyone’s eyes. No one has beach umbrellas or folding chairs—only the Senchenkos and the Plotskys possess such luxuries, but Nadia never comes down to the beach, and Sasha’s umbrella’s been ripped by her children, who are rough and wild and allowed to get away with murder. Katia spends most of her time at the Plotskys’ cottage, eating Cheez Whiz sandwiches, practising cartwheels inside the living room, and plotting mischief. Not something Sonia encourages, of course, but she can’t help relying on anything that keeps her two oldest daughters out of shooting range of each other. Why can’t they get along—why can’t they be friends, best friends, like Katia and Tania?
Katia Martyn and Tania Plotsky. They’d begun their conspiracy their first summer at Kalyna Beach, when they were seven-year-olds. Selecting a patch of smooth, packed sand at the edge of the lake, they’d seized their shovels and started to dig. They were on their way to China, they’d explained to their mothers, who were concerned that someone walking along the beach in the dark might trip into the hole and break an ankle. By then it had become quite a deep hole, and they’d agreed to set up a cairn of stones to alert passersby. The next day, when their fathers had come up for the weekend, Mr. Martyn had hunkered down beside them, observing the digging. In the course of the afternoon he’d given them a lesson in elementary geology, explaining how, under the earth’s crust, there was a fiery kind of liquid stone called magma. He’d even taken a stick and written the word magma in the sand for them, as if on a blackboard at school.
But the girls had gone on digging: geology was all very well, but it had nothing to do with their plans, which were far more important than magma. Once they got to China they were never going to come back: they would wander the earth, getting jobs in circuses to pay their way. Katia was going to be a trapeze artist, Tania a bareback rider (she had been on the ponies at Centre Island lots of times). They would send postcards to their parents every now and again, but they knew even then that family and adventure do not go together. They did not plan to marry, or have babies; they never once toyed with the idea of disguising themselves as boys. Katia had had a low opinion of boys, confirmed by what Tania had told her of her brother’s anatomy: that he’d been born with a peanut between his legs, and a little sac like a change purse. For some time afterward, Katia had refused to eat the peanut butter sandwiches Baba Laryssa would make her for lunch, throwing them into the bushes behind the sleep-house, instead.
Mr. Martyn had come down that night and filled in the tunnel the girls had constructed. The next morning, they’d refused to believe such a disaster could have happened—they’d walked up and down the beach, thinking they must have been digging somewhere else, that so magnificent a tunnel couldn’t just have vanished overnight. “Explain it to them,” Sonia had pleaded with Max, who refused, saying, “Let them think the waves washed it in. They’ll forget about it soon enough.” And it was true that the girls, having finally accepted this first defeat, had given up on digging holes; they had started plotting a quicker, more reliable route to China. They would run away to sea. To save up for their passage, they had started filching nickels from drawers where their mothers kept their loose change, collecting coins in small glass jars that they would bury under the trees, marking each spot with an X of pebbles.
Katia and Tania have outgrown the digging of tunnels, but China has remained their code word for acts of risk and rebellion. It’s to a suburb of China that they’ve agreed to run right now, disappearing down the beach, their long, dark ponytails streaming out behind them. Sonia knows they are off to the store; she also knows she should run after her daughter, scold her—she’ll gorge herself on cream soda and Fudgsicles and have no appetite for lunch. Instead, Sonia calls out from the faded red blanket where she’s settled herself; calls to the water’s edge where Darka is hunkered, watching Baby Alix kick her little legs against waves splashing up to her waist. Is it dangerous? Sonia wonders. Are all the other mothers staring at her, whispering about how careless Sonia Martyn is, how she’ll end up one day with a drowned child on her conscience? What if she asked Darka to bring her the baby and run after Katia? Alix could make sand pies with the plastic moulds that lie forgotten near Sonia’s blanket: gay, bright colours, nothing like the dreary aluminum in which real food is cooked. But Darka doesn’t hear Sonia call, or pretends not to. It is just as well—if Katia’s fetched back, she’ll make a scene in front of everyone. The baby will lose interest in the sand pies and wriggle back to the lake, into the water where her mother, a grown woman, will be terrified to follow her. And that, in truth, is the real reason Darka’s spending the summer with the Martyns at Kalyna Beach.
Darka in her polka-dotted two-piece, from which breasts and buttocks brim, always threatening to spill. She’s only sixteen but, as the mothers say, “fully developed,” which is another way of saying, “trouble.” She alarms and irritates the women lying in groups of twos and threes on worn cotton blankets with the stitching coming loose at the edges, blankets no longer good enough even for the beds at the cottage. All of the women were once as pretty or at least as young as Darka is now, but they would never have flaunted themselves the way she does. Flaunt: it’s a word they employ often that summer, talking of Darka Marchuk. It gives them a deep satisfaction; so does the phrase they use over and over as they watch the way the girl parades the softness and fullness of her body, the obvious pleasure she takes in the bounce of breasts and bum. Has she no shame? Shame they were born with, an old-country birthmark flaring in the shared bathrooms and bedrooms of their own teenaged years in rooming houses on Manning Avenue and Shaw Street. How they’d cowered inside their drab, prim, good-girl clothes, bodies hunched, skins pitted with secrets.
They’ve known each other for years now, these women sitting on blankets, examining their legs for varicose veins, or flapping their arms periodically in attempts to improve what their magzines call “muscle tone.” They have attended each other’s weddings, watched each other’s bellies swelling with children, and those children growing up and up. They’ve shared church pews as well as beach blankets, served out varenyky and houbtsi at banquets in community halls, taken turns driving each other’s children to Ukrainian School on Saturday mornings, gossiped about each other’s marriages, ferried cakes and casseroles to each other’s houses when a new baby or a death arrived. Mrs. Vesiuk, Mrs. Stechyshyn, Mrs. Bozhyk; Mrs. Plotsky and Mrs. Metelsky. Annie, Stefka, Halia, Sasha, Zirka. And Sonia Martyn (once Martyniuk, but altered when her father-in-law developed political ambitions) born Sonia Metelsky. She’d modelled for five years before her marriage, under the name of Sunny Sloane.
It’s good of Sonia to have Darka up to the cottage, the women agree; it will give poor Olya a rest. Nothing but worry that girl has been from the day she first put on a skirt. And who better than Sonia to take her away from the city, where the boys clustered round her like flies on a coil of sticky paper? They’d sewed side by side at the sportswear factory, Sonia and Olya; even when Sonia had stopped sewing and started modelling, they’d stayed closer than sisters. But when Olya married Walter Marchuk the friendship had cracked, like a thin dark line along a china cup out of which you must drink gingerly, never pressing too hard. There is no Ukrainian word for snob; these women, growing up as they had in rooming houses downtown, their parents working at foundries and meat plants and factories, have had little chance to practise snobbery. Sonia has pulled away from Olya, they believe, out of fear, as if her good luck in marrying Max could be put at risk were she to try to keep up old ties. Sonia’s a bad one for fears and superstitions—she takes after her father that way, the women agree.
No, it isn’t snobbery that’s spoiled the friendship between Olya and Sonia, its just—marriage, the women sigh, each of them shaking her head, patting a stomach that the control panel built into her bathing suit never flattens enough. The friendships you make after marriage are never as strong as the ones that come before: it’s your girlfriends you lose on your wedding day, as surely as you lose something else on your wedding night. And who knows the arithmetic of it all, whether what you gain is worth what you have to give up? You married because you fell in love, or else because you were so afraid no one would have you that you grabbed onto the first boy who ever asked you out. In either case you were stuck for life, for better or worse, only it was hardly ever for better—at least, any better than you had a right to expect it would be.
Unless you were Nadia, and who could have foretold what her fortune would be? They’d all laughed at her for getting hooked by Jack Senchenko, who’d got off the train from Canora with wheat in his hair and a bellyful of ambition. Only Nadia had seen him through his own eyes, for what he was going to make of himself. A professor’s daughter, was Nadia; a professor’s daughter with an English accent and an education. No one had ever been good enough for her, certainly not Peter Metelsky, who’d have flown to the moon and back if she’d snapped her fingers. Who could blame her—think of that spectacle he’d made of himself last Saturday night, at the Plotskys’ get-together! Of course she’d given poor Peter the shove—she had far bigger fish to fry, which was why Peter had ended up with Jack’s sister, Zirka, as a consolation prize. That’s why they’re lying on the same blanket now, Sonia and Zirka, a husband and brother in common and nothing else.
Sonia’s hair is the colour of buckwheat honey with not a trace of grey; of course she doesn’t dye it like Zirka does, she’s never been a bottle blonde. Do you see how her hipbones jut out below a stomach flatter than a washboard, for all that she’s had four kids, and lost another along the way? Just look at Zirka beside her: short, stocky like her brother, Jack; the dumpling, Sasha calls her, and not just because of her figure. She has nothing upstairs but flour and water, Sasha explains—and a little native cunning. Poor Peter …
They all call him that, with a sigh built into the “poor,” because he’s such a charmer, Sonia’s brother: handsome as any movie star, far handsomer even than that scar-faced Richard Burton. One thing you had to say about the Metelskys, they had looks on their side. Good looks and bad luck: Jack’s had to bail Peter out more times than you can count. If it weren’t for Jack’s help, the Metelskys would have had to give up their house a long time ago. And Jack had given them the cottage as a present, hadn’t he? Of course he could afford to—he’d made a killing, buying up the lakefront property years before anyone thought of spending their summers here, selling lots to all his friends in the Ukrainian community, telling them they’d have a beach that was nashi, no snooty WASPs around, the kind that expect you to be a janitor or a garbageman if your name ends in “ski” or “chuk.”
They’ve had to work hard, the cottagers of Kalyna Beach, to become respectable in the eyes of what they call their “English neighbours,” even if those neighbours are Scots or Irish or Welsh, even if those neighbours’ families have been settled in Ontario for a hundred years or more. “Tell me all about your tribe,” a business associate of Jack Senchenko’s had once asked Nadia at a dinner party: “I hear your people have some very colourful customs.” “Ask him about his ancestors painting themselves blue,” Sasha had bristled, when Nadia told her the story. “Tell him about the daggers our men slip into the waistbands of their sharovary.” But one of our men was a senator now, and another a judge; one a provincial MP and another a surgeon at Saint Joe’s; the last thing the community needs is a spoiled, careless creature like Darka getting into trouble, bringing shame on them all. What are her parents up to, letting her run around the way she does?
Darka doesn’t hear the women whispering together on their blankets, throwing her glances like poisoned darts. She picks up Baby Alix as if she were a book with especially hard covers, tucks her under her arm and bounces up to the dunes where the girls’ encampment lies.
Mrs. Maximoynko’s store is called Venus Variety, but not on account of its wares: beach towels, pails, shovels, licorice ropes, jawbreakers, Black Cat, Player’s and Export A cigarettes, Hostess Twinkies, Corn Flakes, bakery cakes wrapped in Cellophane that gives them a chemical smell, hot dog buns and Maple Leaf wieners, condiments, serviettes, sanitary napkins (kept behind the counter), baby oil and odds and ends of hardware, for emergency repairs. There is nothing remotely resembling erotic or contraceptive devices for sale, and while the shelves have a few issues of Archie and Superman comics, what Mrs. Maximoynko calls gerrrrlie magazines are out of the question. She keeps a clean shop, under the portrait of the Youthful Queen in Coronation Robes beside the Canada Dry clock over the counter.
The store was called Venus Variety when the Maximoynkos bought it years ago. It’s unlucky to change names, and besides, Mrs. Maximoynko likes the sound of it, the Vs at the start of each word, the ripple of vowels. Under that name is written her own, M. MAXIMOYNKO, PROP., and beside it, taking up all the leftover space, is a picture of the cloud-wrapped planet spinning like a top, commissioned from an acquaintance of Mr. Maximoynko, a man who was a portrait painter back in Ukraine, and who now works at General Electric.
Tania Plotsky is wandering the centre aisle of the store, sucking on a licorice rope that leaves stains like bruises on her lips. In front of her walks Katia Martyn, her head bobbing up and down. Mrs. Maximoynko knows what she’ll find when she’s finished ringing up the Durkowskis’ groceries (a tin of alphabet soup, a jar of pickles, a pint of cottage cheese). All the cakes along that centre aisle will have the maraschino cherries in their middles pushed down to the filling, the Cellophane stretched tight, if not broken, so she’ll have to put them on the Reduced for Quick Sale shelf. She’d have spoken to Sasha and Sonia about their daughters long ago, but Sasha is one of her best customers (she spends a fortune on cigarettes and hot dogs each week) and Sonia’s been low since the death of her mother, whose health had started to suffer at Christmas, and whom they’d buried before Easter. Cancer they said it was: Sonia had nearly gone out of her mind with grief, was what they also said.
“Katrusiu, Taniu,” Mrs. Maximoynko cries out from behind the cash register. “Shcho vy tam robyteh?” And then she switches to her broken, superbly theatrical English: “I aska Momma. You gonna get it, vunna dese days.”
The girls rush out of the shop, slamming the screen door behind them; as soon as they reach the road they collapse, writhing, kicking out their feet, helplessly abandoned to their laughter. “Did you see her tsytsi when she was yelling at us?” Katia shrieks. “They were shaking like—” “Hostess cupcakes!” Tania supplies, which sets them off into fresh snorts of laughter. Finally they wind down, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands. Propped against one another, they start singing a song they’d had to learn at Ukrainian School: My chemnyi deetyh, Ukrayeenski kveety. Their high, sweet voices dart in with the flies through the worn screen door. We obedient children, flowers of Ukraine.
Mrs. Maximoynko shakes her head, and her massive bosom shakes in sympathy. Pan and Pani Durkowski nod. (They are always addressed by these Ukrainian equivalents of Mr. and Mrs.; they seem to demand that dignity, for all that they work as janitors at the cathedral hall.) When they’d first come to Kalyna Beach, they’d gone round to the various mothers, suggesting they could organize a morning program for the children right on the beach. Calisthenics and recitations from the national poets, followed by a round of Ukrainian folksongs. All the mothers had thanked them, saying what a wonderful idea such a program would be, but when it came to the first session, half of the children hadn’t shown up, and the rest had wandered away before the stride jumps were finished. The mothers apologized, but there was nothing they could do. “They go to Ukrainian School all year,” one had explained, “so they really want a holiday while they’re up here.” And as Sonia Martyn had ventured: “The children were born here, they don’t feel the same way about the old country as we do, there’s no point in forcing them.” But then, Pan Durkowski had growled to his wife, look at those Martyns, changing their name, making it English-sounding. Their children had been the last ones of all to be enrolled at Ukrainian School. In vain had Sonia explained that Laura, who had spoken nothing but Ukrainian till she was five, had come home from English school one day with a note from the principal: It would be better if your child stopped speaking Russian in the playground.
“Russian!” Pan Durkowski had snorted. “The idiot principal thought that they were Russian?”
Pani Durkowska had tried to explain it to her husband: “Max has to be careful, he has his practice to build, and Sonia has always been frightened—” adding, under her breath, “the way all of us who weren’t born here are frightened—that we could be picked up and shipped back, without so much as a word of warning.”
“But to let some stupid Anhleek believe there is no difference between speaking the noble, the ancient, the beautiful Ukrainian tongue and being Communists!” Pan Durkowski had roared. “That is a crime, I tell you—a crime as bad as murder in the first degree!”
He is fond of roaring, Pan Durkowski: here he is now, thundering forth as his wife stares up at the portrait of the brown-haired, pudding-faced woman in diamanté armour, to whom she’d sworn allegiance at her citizenship hearing the year before. “Who is going to carry on the battle?” he exclaims, bringing his fist down hard on the counter, so that the jawbreakers rattle in their jar. “Who will hold their hands over their hearts and march off to free our poor Ukraine? The youth of today? Pah! They have no respect; all their parents teach them is to put out their hands for whatever they want. While in the Homeland, children are beaten for speaking Ukrainian instead of Russian in the schools! Beaten!”
He looks as if he would like to run out and perform that precise punishment on Tania and Katia. Instead, he takes off his glasses, breathes against them till the lenses steam, polishes them with a pale blue handkerchief in his shaking hands. His wife brings her gaze back from the portrait of the Youthful Queen to Mrs. Maximoynko’s small, heart-shaped face, so incongruous against her steel-wool hair, the bulk of her breasts. Pani Durkowska is anxious to change the subject; thankfully, she remembers that they need a length of copper pipe to repair the bathroom sink: her husband is a real handyman, she tells Mrs. Maximoynko, using the English word, hendy-men. The proprietor of Venus Variety checks her supply of hardware, sells them the pipe, and bids the Durkowskis good day.
The old people walk out into the stinging light, shoes scraping over the asphalt as they make their way along Tunnel Road, back to their cottage. For it is far too hot for them to be on the beach at this hour: they have had their morning walk long before breakfast and will return when the families are all indoors eating their suppers, and the beach is deserted. The Durkowskis prefer quiet pursuits: reading, gardening, playing solitaire. Perhaps they are not so very disappointed, after all, that their Beachside Ukrainian School has come to nothing.
Katia and Tania are far, far ahead of the elderly couple, on the part of Tunnel Road that goes to the Shkurkas’ cottage—they still call it that, even though Mr. Shkurka’s been gone for the past eight years—“probably married again and fathered a dozen sons.” At least that’s what they’ve heard Katia’s aunt Zirka say on the Plotskys’ veranda, talking with the other mothers. The girls are a little drunk with what Katia calls “being bad.” It’s their defining attribute; their mothers have had endless phone calls from their Ukrainian School teachers—Miss Marchenko, who wears her hair in a lofty coil, and whom the girls call Bagel Head in her hearing; Mr. Khriniuk, who does have a peculiar habit of tapping his front teeth with his forefinger, and whom they’ve christened Pan Pecker.
Pan Pecker had caught the girls drinking Cherry Cokes at the Sombrero Restaurant next to the Funeral Parlour when they were supposed to be in class, doing dictation; the week before that, they’d disrupted the rehearsal of the Harvest Dance by the most disgraceful jerking and shoving (by which Miss Marchenko meant the Twist). The only way their mothers could get them to behave was by threatening to take them out of Ukrainian School altogether, which would have meant that, except for the summers, they’d never have seen one another at all. For Tania lives in the north, and Katia in the west end of the city; and though Sonia and Sasha see a lot of each other at Kalyna Beach, once they’re back in Toronto they could be living in different provinces. Chastened, the girls would behave for a few Saturdays, and then come up with some new piece of deviltry—Pan Pecker’s word for it—whereupon the long, complaining phone calls would begin again.
Dark hair, dark eyes, olive-coloured skin over their toothpick bodies—they are so alike they could be twins, thinks Lesia Baziuk, catching sight of Tania and Katia from the front porch of Mrs. Shkurka’s house. The women are sitting at a small table facing the road: Mrs. Baziuk has opened her little case of cosmetics and is showing Nettie Shkurka the five different shades of nail polish Avon is stocking this season. Mrs. Baziuk has one eye on Mrs. Shkurka’s face, its show of superior suspicion at the names and colours of the products; Nettie is such a prude that she’ll end by rejecting any hint of what even a bit of face powder and a natural-tint lipstick could do for her, settling instead on the invisibles: moisturizer, cleanser and the inevitable cotton balls.
Lesia Baziuk’s other eye is trained on her son, Billy, who is sitting patiently on the porch steps below them, looking out at the road, his hands folded nicely in his lap. Every morning she gives him his medicine, one pill to ward off seizures, the other, as the doctor said, to settle him down and make her life a little easier. For Frank Kozak gives her no help at all with Billy. “Another guy has sown the seed and done the deed” had been his response to Lesia’s first few pleas for assistance. Now, she wouldn’t trust him to comb Billy’s hair or shine his shoes. Frank Kozak, as everyone knows, thinks only of himself: besides, he’s always tippling from that sleek, silver flask he keeps in his pocket wherever he goes. He is also married, though not to Mrs. Baziuk, whose husband died in a hunting accident many years ago. When the children are nearby, Frank Kozak is referred to by the adults as Mrs. Baziuk’s “special friend.” Sasha has been heard to exclaim that she can’t for the life of her understand why Lesia Baziuk has anything to do with him, and Sonia Martyn responds that it might have something to do with Frank’s having a clean and decent job, working for the Insurance.
Lesia’s made sure he’s kept that job; at home, she ladles his booze out to him, glass by glass, calculating how much he can take and still do a reasonable day’s work; she’s arranged to get a portion of his paycheque deposited in her own account each month. His boss is a kind man with a son Billy’s age; he is willing to overlook a lot to help Lesia out, as long as Frank’s numbers keep adding up all right, as by some miracle they do. There’s a trust account in Billy’s name, and when the time comes he’ll have to go into a Home, but not while there’s a breath left in her body. He’s an affectionate boy, obedient and thoughtful in his own way. Unlike those giggling show-offs. Cruel as if they had—Mrs. Baziuk thinks for a moment—knives instead of hearts in their chests. Jackknives! She can see the faces they’re pulling as they look at her Billy; she tells herself that it’s their mothers who should be pitied instead of her—better to have a sweet, slow boy like Billy than those two she-devils.
What his mother can’t see, and what the girls are making faces at, is Billy’s hand pumping at his crotch. This isn’t a matter of peanut butter sandwiches: Billy is old enough to drink, and drive, and even get married. “Meat on a stick,” Katia whispers to Tania, who snorts with laughter as Mrs. Baziuk shakes her fist and shouts down the road, “Have you no shame?”
Mornings belong to the beach. The children spend their time running back and forth between the water and the dunes: roasting, then plunging into the lake, running across the sandbars till the water rises up to their knees, and then their waists, and then their shoulders. They play tag, or practise dead man’s float, or just bob up and down: on stormy days they dive right through the breakers, swallowing pints of water and spluttering onto shore only when their mothers force them out, hovering with faded beach towels, rubbing them dry till their skins feel as though they’ve been pushed through graters.
Mostly, the weather is cloudless: by the time the children have quit the lake and raced to their different fortresses behind the dunes, they’re seared with sun. On the east end of the beach, the boys are sequestered; on the west, the girls. Even though two of those boys, Yuri and Andriy, are their cousins, the Martyn girls have agreed to their banishment, on the beach, at least, and in daylight. But in the evenings, when their mothers lie slumped on sofas, having cooked supper and swept the floors for the hundredth time, having rinsed out bathing suits and hung them on the line with the sodden, sand-clumped towels, some of the older boys and girls go off in groups of three or four, walking along Tunnel Road, playing tag at the edge of the woods, spying at the lighted windows of other people’s cottages.
Right now the Martyn girls and their friends—Tania, Vlada, Lenka, Rocky-short-for-Roksolana—lie flopped on their towels for as long as they can stand the sun. Every so often, they spring up and sprint to the water, shrieking at how the sand is cooking their feet. Their mothers grumble as this same sand sprays into their faces while the brown bodies leap by, an exotic species of animal they’ve no idea how to name.
Between nine a.m., when the mothers march the children down to the beach, and noon, when it’s time to gather them up and head back to make lunch, the women may get five minutes all to themselves, spread-eagled on their blankets, drinking the sun through their pores, the hot sand cradling their bodies like the most gentle of lovers. Sometimes it’s so still they can hear flies crawling over the debris of potato chips or browned apple slices; sometimes a strong, warm wind plays over the women, fanning skin redolent of baby oil or the first-aid smell of Noxema. Waves thump the shore and a few gulls screech lazily overhead while, neither far away nor too close by, children’s voices bubble up like water from a spring. When the children are being good, making sandcastles or playing tag behind the dunes, their mothers can shut their eyes and let themselves drift, as if they were pieces of wood bobbing up and down in water so clear and shallow it could not drown a spider.
On her cotton blanket, red bleached-out to pink, Sonia stretches her body into the endless air and sun; she’s a kite floating wherever the wind will take her. Max and Marta are still far, far away in the city, small black ants she could stretch out her finger and crush, one after the other. No one is drowning, no one is crying or shouting or grabbing at her; she could sleep here forever and ever. Except that a shadow’s suddenly fallen across her, a cold, soaked towel of a shadow that knows her name, and sits down beside her, and begins to talk. Because the shadow is married to her brother, and Sonia will never hear the end of it if she pretends Zirka is merely a cloud passing overhead, she must stop being that kite sailing away and attend to what her sister-in-law is saying in that piercing voice of hers.
“She’s growing up fast, your Laryssa.”
“Laura. She only answers to Laura, now.”
“Fourteen in November, isn’t she? We’d like to buy her something special—it’s an important birthday, she’s getting to be a young lady.”
“We’re getting her contact lenses. There’s a man at the Medical Arts Building who fits them.”
“Bozhe, Soniu—it’s dangerous, putting things in your eyes. You can go blind. I know I’d never forgive myself if—”
“Max has checked it out—it’s perfectly safe. They’ve been wearing them for years in the States. And I know girls who’ve worn them without any trouble—models I used to work with.”
“Oh. Models.” Zirka’s voice puckers with disapproval. She may have worked before she married, but at a respectable job at Beaver Bakery, making and decorating cakes for birthdays and weddings. Whereas Sonia had exposed herself to photographers (from outside the community, most of them); she’d even spent time in New York, staying in hotels meeting heaven knows who. Of course, the Metelskys had been as poor as fleas; whatever Sonia earned must have come in all too handy but still—“Models,” Zirka repeats, nodding her head. “Like the one you named Bonnie after—what was her name?”
“Bon-nie Mac-Leod.” Sonia produces the syllables as if they were weights from a pair of kitchen scales: years ago she’d been taught how to pronounce them correctly: Not clee-odd, Sunny, but clowd, like those puffy white things up there in the sky.
“What a time you had with Max’s father over that name.” Zirka’s voice is like the reek of an opened bottle of nail polish. “What was it he said? I remember, I was visiting you in maternity, and Mr. Martyniuk came in and shouted—the whole ward could hear him—‘Bony! What kind of name is that? You gonna starve her?’”
“I have a headache, Zirka,” is all that Sonia says. Though she can’t keep herself from remembering what had followed the “Bony” crack: what Zirka, mercifully, hadn’t stayed on to hear. He’d said it right there in the hospital room, her father-in-law. He’d leaned right over her, to where Max was standing, as if he’d meant to grab his son by the shoulders; as if she weren’t there lying in the bed between them, her newborn in her arms. “You gonna let her get away with naming her that?” he’d roared. And then, “Three chances she’s had now and she can’t even give you one son?”
Max had knuckled under, pleading with her to change their child’s name from Bonnie to anything Ukrainian: Oksana or Marusia or Motria, after his mother. But she’d stood her ground. Staring into her baby’s face, the tight-shut lips and buttoned eyes, all she’d been able to think of was Bonnie MacLeod. How forthright and free she’d always been, that friend of her lost life—how stunningly unburdened. That’s what she’d wished for this new child; with her whole heart she’d wished for her the gifts she’d so envied in Bonnie MacLeod.
“Your poor Laryssa,” Zirka was saying. “Of course, she’ll look much prettier without glasses, and if she can manage to lose some weight … It’s so important when you’re at that age to look your best. And children can be so cruel,” she adds smugly.
Sonia doesn’t deign to reply. How dare Zirka say a word about Laura’s size: doesn’t she know that all girls on the verge of puberty put on puppy fat? And Zirka’s one to talk: look at her—look at her youngest; now there’s a fatty in the making! Laura’s chubbiness will melt away, all in good time, isn’t that what she’s been told, over and over? Yet she acts as if it’s her mother’s fault she’s gaining weight, her mother’s fault for making the Jell-O and lemon meringue pie that Laura loves, always first in line for second helpings, first in line for picking fights, taking offence, being difficult. Sonia’s headache stabs in earnest now; she feels the first squirm of nausea. Stretched on her stomach, her cheek nuzzling the blanket, sun beating down on her bare back and long, long legs, Sonia tries to turn Zirka’s words into horseflies buzzing round her, settling on places she can’t reach to swat; letting them drink their fill before they leave her be. It’s not her fault that Laura’s the way she is.
Before she’d emerged from the womb they were already fighting. A breech birth: “You look like a battlefield inside,” the nurse had told her, after the anaesthetic had worn off. Things had gone from bad to worse, Laura biting the nipple with her milk teeth when put to the breast, or else refusing to nurse, so that there’d been endless fussing with a breast pump before Sonia had given up, at last. She’d felt such a failure, her breasts deflating like pricked balloons, Laura throwing up formula in her lap or into a pile of freshly washed diapers. After all the hopes she’d had, with that first pregnancy—this great lump of a Laura with glasses thick as a telephone book, and the fine, limp hair they can do nothing with, in spite of pincurls and home permanents. Perhaps if they dyed it, gave it some body … Maybe Laura would be happier that way—sunnier—with contact lenses and blonde hair. Maybe she’d stop picking fights with Katia, who can’t help being as clever, as pretty as she is, dark and thin and dancing almost before she could walk. While Laura still trips over her own two feet: bandages on her knees, a scowl on her face, and that huge, sharp chip on her shoulder. So much like Marta it’s terrifying.
Max is bringing Marta with him tonight: she’ll be here for a whole week, Sonia groans to herself. Every summer since they bought their cottage at Kalyna Beach, Max has brought his sister up to stay. Because it’s so hot in the city, he always says. Though, as Sonia’s told her husband once, ten times, a hundred times, it’s Marta’s own fault she nearly boils herself alive: she won’t open the windows for fear of burglars; she refuses to turn on the fan they bought her because it costs money, and besides, how can she complain about the heat if the fan’s turned on? Max is also bringing Marta because he feels guilty, has been made to feel guilt all his life about his only sibling, who plays him like a virtuoso, pulling from him any tune she wants. She’ll complain about the children being too loud, tracking sand into the cottage, which she’ll then insist on sweeping up, though the doctor’s told her it’s bad for her to exert herself. She’ll find fault with the cooking, and the poorness of the children’s Ukrainian. Most of all, she’ll shake her head and mutter darkly about how Sonia’s failed to produce a son: Girls are useless. It’s the boy that counts.
If she could only let it all go in one ear and out the other, the way her mother had counselled her. Her mother was the only one who could handle Marta—the only one whom Marta had respected, or perhaps, feared enough not to try to lord it over. Why is it her mother who’s dead and not Marta, Marta who’s always off at somebody’s funeral, then phoning to announce that she’ll be the next to go? Why take a woman who loved life so, even the hard life given her; why take someone who was always singing or laughing, or helping out this or that neighbour, and leave that mean, sour rind of a woman instead?
Reluctantly, Sonia turns onto her back, opens her eyes and stares through her dark glasses straight up into God’s blue, blue eye. Zirka puts a hand like a stone on her sister-in-law’s head:
“You really ought to have a hat on. No wonder you get those terrible headaches, lying in the sun like this.”
Sonia sits up, raking her fingers through her hair. Her skin is the colour of brown sugar, her eyes are almost turquoise, Zirka thinks. Her father was Polish, wasn’t he, half Polish? She looks like a Pole, not a Ukrainian.
“It must be nice to have Darka to take the children off your hands,” Zirka goes on. “Especially Alix—though I guess you couldn’t ask for a better baby, so … quiet all the time. And thank heavens Annie Vesiuk is such a strong swimmer—it makes me nervous, all these children in the water, and no lifeguard around. My Yuri has his Junior badge, he can always pitch in if there’s an emergency. And Annie’s boys—it’s incredible, isn’t it—eight boys and all of them champion swimmers. Even the baby’s started and he’s only six months; she has him right in the water with the rest of them. Eight boys! You and Annie should trade recipes, Sonia.”
This time Zirka’s voice makes Sonia think of a sink full of cold, greasy water, the drain choked. “I’m going to check on the girls,” she says, not caring if Zirka thinks her rude for walking off. But instead of struggling to the girls’ encampment at the top of the dunes, Sonia stops halfway, turning her eyes in the direction of the lake, as if looking for a boat on the water, or some distant sign of land: a place where she will feel, at last, guiltless, requited, home.
“Make sure she keeps her hat on, and don’t you dare let her out of your sight.”
Darka drops the baby into Laura’s lap and makes for the lake; Alix immediately scrambles to Katia. Nearly three, Alix is small for her age, small and thin and even darker than Katia, her eyes and hair black instead of brown. And she holds herself so rigid, it’s like a bundle of sticks falling into your lap when she plunks herself down, sucking her two front fingers, her black eyes watching everything, everyone. Bonnie hands Alix a plastic shovel to dig with and a small blue sieve. The baby holds the shovel in her hand as if she’s never seen anything like it before, and then, as if to reassure them, as if she were a grown-up joining in a child’s game she only half remembers, pats the shovel against the hot, loose sand. Baby Alix has never said even a single one of these words, though all her sisters were chattering away by the time they were two. Language stays locked in her throat like a safety pin she’s swallowed, but that’s bound to show up, sooner or later, like in an X-ray on the cartoons. Or so their father tells them. There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s perfectly capable of speaking, the doctor says so. If anyone asks about Alix, they are to say that she’s perfectly normal, bright as a button, though it’s never explained what buttons have to do with it. She’s just taking her time, that’s what they’re supposed to say: good things are worth waiting for.
But none of the girls assembled in the little hollow behind the dunes says anything nasty about Alix. If the boys were here it would be different—they would tease the legs off a spider. They are such babies, the girls agree. Any boy older than thirteen is off at the Ukrainian summer camp in Oakville, a camp run along military lines whose discipline, the fathers argue, is good for boys of that age—“that age” meaning old enough to argue with their fathers and be rude to their mothers. At camp they learn to carry messages across enemy lines, to dig trenches and communicate by semaphore—explained to their sisters as something involving flags and cunning. Any boy older than thirteen is at camp, except, of course, for Billy Baziuk, who spends every second of every day and night with his mother. As for the boys at the beach this year, they occupy themselves by hanging round the service station across the road from Venus Variety, inhaling the sharp smell of gasoline from the pumps, or else diving from a raft anchored at a part of the lake where the sandbars stop and the water’s cold and deep and dangerous.
Today the boys have decided to forgo the diving raft: overnight, a huge driftwood log has rolled up onto the beach. None of them has ever been in a canoe; some have never seen one, unlike their friends at English school who go to summer camps with names like Gitchigoumi and Oconto, learning to identify animal tracks and survive in the bush. So the boys decide to turn their find into a galley instead of a giant canoe; eight of them sit astride the log, paddling furiously out into open water. They’re going to Australia, the huge rock thirty yards offshore, close enough that you can swim back easily if you’ve got your Junior badge. Even so, the mothers take it in turns to pace along the shore, and the girls take no chances, posting spies at the edge of the dunes where they spread their beach towels and sit rubbing baby oil onto their arms and legs, already brown as barbecued duck. The tall, rough grass makes a perfect screen, and the dunes themselves could be the high walls of a Cossack fortress, below which Turks and Tatars lie plotting.
The girls’ talk jumps about like the sand fleas they bury in shallow graves at the edges of their towels. Bonnie, who has just turned nine, is the youngest; Laura the oldest, and Katia and Tania have both turned twelve this summer. As for the others, they take up the slack between Laura and Bonnie. There’s something insistent, authoritative, about this ranking due to birthdate, something Laura’s grateful for, knowing as she does that otherwise they’d never give her the time of day, not only Katia but all the other girls at the beach, except for Bonnie. If Anastasia Shkurka were here she’d have a natural ally, but Nastia is delicate, prone to sunstroke and heat rash, and her mother keeps her inside in the mornings, when the sun is hottest.
Somehow the conversation turns to Nastia, to how sickly she is, how pale and nervous.
“I don’t think she’s delicate at all,” Tania observes. “I think Nastia Shkurka’s about as delicate as a rubber tire. She hasn’t any guts, that’s all.”
A thrill goes through the group of girls on hearing the word guts—it’s a boy’s word, and there’s something daring just in hearing Tania speak it.
“If Nastia woke up one morning with a pimple on her face she’d get a heart attack,” Katia crows. “Nasty Nastia.”
“Shut up.” Laura says this out of loyalty, not because it isn’t true. If Nastia were to grow a pimple she probably would walk round with her chin cupped in her hand, to hide it. She’s always scared to do things her mother wouldn’t like—things her mother would never find out about in a hundred years, like looking at the book Laura found in Sonia’s bedside table, and brought with her once to the Shkurkas’ cottage. “You shut right up,” Laura says, adding a word that’s higher up on the forbidden list than guts: “Dupo. Smerdiucha dupo.”
The girls shiver. Everyone knows that there’s a war going on between Katia and Laura. Their last fight has acquired mythic status among the girls at Kalyna Beach; everyone’s heard how, that one day it rained, that day of being cooped up indoors with already-thumbed-through books and decks of cards with the queens or aces missing, Katia had started teasing Laura about her weight. Laura had thrown a book at her—a book that had hit not Katia, but the statue their mother had brought up to the cottage and placed on the mantelpiece, a plaster statue in the shape of a boy and girl kissing under an umbrella. The Martyn children knew the story of that statue by heart: how it was the first luxury Baba Laryssa had ever owned, the first thing she’d ever possessed that couldn’t be worn or eaten. Dyeedo had bought it for her just before he died: it was priceless, their mother claimed. Though if it were such a treasure, why was it up at the cottage? And why had the children heard their father refer to it, when their mother wasn’t around, as “that monstrosity”?
The statue had fallen almost noiselessly; Katia had quickly swept up the pieces with dustpan and brush, but Sonia had known at once. She’d marched in from the screened porch directly to the garbage can, slipped the lid open and, with her bare hands, pulled out the shards of the statue. And then she’d had highsterics, as Laura called them. When she’d finally got around to asking which of them was responsible, Katia had yelled “Laura,” and Laura, “Katia.” They had both been punished: made to stay indoors the whole of the next clear, sunny day, with Laura forbidden to visit Nastia, and Katia to run off to Tania’s. As for the statue, its pieces were put in a cardboard box, labelled in Sonia’s uncertain script, broken statu, and placed on the shelf beside the screen door, so that every time they went in or out of the kitchen, the girls would see it, and feel appropriately guilty.
But they didn’t: they were preoccupied with other feelings. It hadn’t been the punishment so much as the sense of injustice that had poisoned the aftermath, each of the sisters convinced that the other was to blame, both unwilling to bury their differences and unite against their mother. There’d been something else, as well, something ugly and invisible, like a terrible smell that seeps into a room. For the first time in all the years of their being sisters, Laura and Katia had understood that in spite of what people were always telling them, there was something thicker than blood. There was the possibility of something sharp and hard and persistent, something you couldn’t un-feel. Instead of deflecting their shame at having broken their baba’s treasure, instead of whispering to each other, “stupid old statue,” and “who cares if The Monstrosity got broken,” they’d put an icy silence between them, broken only by jabs at each other whenever an audience cropped up.
Smerdiucha dupo. Laura’s taunt hovers in the air, a party balloon that won’t pop. Hearing it in Ukrainian is far more exciting for the girls than if Laura had used the English words—it’s as if they’ve overheard their grandparents swearing. Everyone waits for Katia to hit back, knowing she’s taking her time, waiting for effect, preparing an insult far more devastating than “smelly bum,” when Bonnie pipes up in her sweet, clear voice. “Tell us a story, Laura,” she pleads, picking up a fistful of sand and letting it dribble out her fingers, the white and black grains finer, even, than salt and pepper pouring from their shakers. “Tell us Ball Erectory.”
Tania sniggers. When Laura pokes her with her elbow she puts her hand to her lips, as if the snigger were a fly that had flown into her mouth and disappeared.
“It’s called Ball Rectory, Bonnie, and I told it yesterday, and last night, and I’m sick of it.”
Laura’s been elected storyteller this summer—from the “English” girls at school she’s picked up dozens of ghost stories that they’ve learned at summer camp along with how to make pine-cone necklaces and miniature teepees out of birchbark. Ball Rectory is about Albania, whose lover is killed by an evil lord in a duel. She has a child out of wedlock in a convent, and both of them perish of hunger and cold at the hands of the Abbess, who is the sister of the evil lord, and who is tortured ever after by the wails of the perished Albania and her newborn child.
“I’m sick and tired of that story,” Laura grumbles. “I’ll tell you Cleopatra instead.” Bonnie exhales slowly, careful not to let her sisters see her relief; determined to keep the peace for as long, and as invisibly, as possible.
The girls lie spread out on their towels, sometimes spitting a few grains of sand from their mouths, or twitching their bodies when flies crawl up their calves. Laura alone sits cross-legged, reciting from the Souvenir Booklet. Her voice takes on a deep, reverent tone, ringing out over the blankets and echoing between the dunes:
We, as we read of the deeds of the Queen of Egypt, must doff our modern conception of right and wrong; and, as we pace the courts of the Ptolemies, and breathe the atmosphere of the first century before Christ, we must not commit the anachronism of criticizing our surroundings from the standard of twenty centuries after Christ.
“Is that English?” Tania asks. Laura ignores her, but then Katia joins in.
“What does anachronism mean?” Katia’s only asking because she thinks Laura doesn’t know—that she can trip her up in front of all the others.
“It’s a kind of sin,” Laura says loftily. They seem to expect something else, and so she blunders on. “It’s something you commit. Like Communism.” She’s thinking of the photograph that appears in the book above the words she’s just recited, words picked out in huge black print. The picture shows a banquet hall with silk-draped walls under green and purple lights that remind her of the peels of cucumbers and eggplants. It’s a small picture, but you can still see a man whose skin only goes as far down as his hips, and whose legs are covered with fur. Two other men are wearing skorts like in gym class, and ladies in bikinis perch like budgies on swings, watching as the men in skorts dance between lighted torches.
Beautiful and seductive Cleopatra was, but she was also a hereditary ruler, a woman of rare spirit and courage, cosmopolitan and yet superstitious, ardent and at times, lonely. And always proud. Her conversation was known to be scintillating, her mind keen.
This is the part Laura likes best, for though she knows she’ll never be beautiful, a rare spirit and scintillating mind are things she can train herself to acquire, the way she was able to cure herself of flat arches by picking up marbles and pencils with her toes every night for a year. The word ardent especially enchants her: it makes her think of small golden arrows, thin as fishbones and with flames instead of feathers at their ends.
Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XIII, had stated in his will that she was to share the throne of Egypt with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIV. But he plotted against her and threatened to kill her and she was forced to flee to Syria.
Impatient with the interruptions, Laura stops quoting from the Souvenir Booklet. She tells them how Julius Caesar, having defeated his rival in battle, travels to Alexandria to decide who should inherit the throne of Egypt, and how Cleopatra has herself wrapped up in a carpet and carried in to him, just like a hot dog in a bun, so that her brother won’t find out and stab her in the back. Tania nods hearing this; her brother is nine; he would stab her in a minute, she says, if she didn’t watch out. Laura ignores her.
“Cleopatra’s faithful retainer, Apollodorus, who is silently and hopelessly in love with the Queen, carries her into Caesar’s apartments as if he were trying to sell him the rug.”
“Why would Julius Caesar need to buy a rug if he was Absolute Master of the Roman World? Why wouldn’t Apple—whatever his name is—take the rug to Caesar’s wife instead?” Katia’s questions are imperious.
“She was in Rome,” Laura shoots back. “The wife doesn’t matter—Cleopatra does. When she stepped out of the rug—”
“Like a showgirl from a cake?”
“—he was charmed by her beauty and her cleverness, and fell in love with her forever after.”
“But you said he had a wife.”
“If all you’re going to do is make stupid remarks, I won’t tell you anything,” Laura fumes.
At which point Darka returns, dripping water from her brassy hair and clutching a movie magazine with the words SYBIL’S ANGUISH screaming from the cover. Darka bends down to wipe Alix’s nose; the baby retaliates by grabbing the magazine, tearing off the back page and crumpling it into a ball, which she proceeds to suck on. Darka retrieves the rest of the magazine; expertly, she spreads out her towel, flopping on her back, pulling her straps down from her shoulders. The girls nudge one another—even Laura’s included—at the sight of Darka’s big breasts bulging under the top of her two-piece. And then their heads dive down and they pretend to sleep; the noise they hear this time is a mother’s flip-flops climbing up the dunes.
It’s Sonia, all out of breath, her hand like a visor over her dark glasses. All she sees is the baby stuffing paper in its mouth while Darka soaks up sun like a great, soft starfish. “Darka,” she shouts.
The edge in her voice makes Laura think of the strip of metal on a pack of wax paper.
“I need you up at the cottage, it’s time to start lunch. Bring the baby with you.”
Darka slowly folds her arms and legs together, and, her eyes still closed, starts pulling up the straps of her bathing suit. For some reason this irritates Sonia more than the baby’s chewing on the page from Darka’s magazine.
“For God’s sake, don’t take all day, Darka, I’m not paying you to sunbathe!”
“You’re not paying me, period,” the girls hear Darka grunt as she stands up and kicks her feet into her flip-flops. The baby bats at her with the plastic shovel as Darka stoops to pick her up.
When she reaches the path to the cottage, Sonia turns and calls to her daughters: “Laura, Katia, Bonnie—shake out your towels and come up with us. Right now! Do you hear me? No dawdling. Laura!”
Laura just sits with her fine hair flapping into her eyes, listening to the howls of Baby Alix. She is saying her mother’s name over and over to herself, as if calling her Sonia rather than Mama will diminish her power, shrink what Laura calls the World of the Mothers, a world apt to swell up over their children and press down on them at the same time. A world of Because I Said So, and I Told You So; of What Is It Now? and That’s Just The Way It Is. It’s this last refrain that troubles Laura most, the law, verging on commandment, that life—everyone’s life, from Chucha Marta’s to Baby Alix’s—is fixed in a pattern rigid as the wool of Baba Motria’s kylym, the black rug woven by Baba Motria herself, a treasure, a monstrosity like the statue of the boy and girl beneath the umbrella. Recalling the stiff heaviness of the kylym, Laura thinks of how different men’s lives are from women’s. In men’s lives there’s some give to the weave, there are holes you can slip through and escape from, like Nastia’s father did; as Uncle Peter tries so hard to do with his jokes and his play-acting. Whereas women are stitched fast to their lives: stitched and slammed and stuck together like the wool of the kylym, with its clumsy, shrimp-coloured roses, its mouldy-basement smell.
Bonnie is running over to their mother, telling her not to worry, that they’ll all be right up, so that Sonia can turn to leave, her dignity intact. The girls follow her up the hillside, Laura lagging behind on the worn logs that serve as steps. When she reaches the top, she pauses, reluctant to cross the lawn to the cottage. Clutching the edges of her towel round her neck, she whispers, “Thus stood the great Marc Antony at the Battle of Philippi, when he faced Brutus on the desert sands!” She lets the towel drop; she is dragging it behind her as she walks across the crabgrass to the kitchen door when, halfway there, she stops. From the patch of tall weeds beside the sleep-house comes a sudden rustling sound. As if someone is crouched in the shadows, someone who means no good, like Cleopatra’s brother. Suddenly, Laura forgets about Cleopatra; suddenly, she knows that something dark and cold is hiding in the weeds. It’s not something out of a story, or a souvenir book, but something real, over which she has no power, even of words.
Darka’s started yelling at her out the kitchen window, ordering her inside to eat lunch. Shaking, Laura turns her back on the weeds and runs up the stairs, slamming the screen door in that savage way her mother can’t stand.
After lunch, everyone’s happy to stay inside: if you were to go outdoors your skin would turn lobster red and all the next day you’d have to lie in a darkened room, your back and shoulders puffing, then peeling while your mother says I-told-you-so and pours on calamine lotion that stains the sheets a cloudy pink and gives off the odour of medicine. After lunch, you stay shut up at the cottage, digesting your meal; you nap, if you’re too small to do anything else, or leaf through comics and old magazines on your bed. By three o’clock it’s safe to go swimming again; everyone goes back down to the beach, the same procession as in the morning but quieter, calmer. The mothers scold less and hardly shout at all: they’ve had time to drink coffee or tea, to visit each other, or just to lie down with cold cloths on their heads while their children sleep and stay out of trouble. Spreading their blankets back over the sand, the mothers know that the most demanding part of the day is done. Later, when they stare out their picture windows or from lookout points to the sun setting over the lake, they will remind themselves how it’s been another perfect day, and how lucky they are to be at the cottage instead of in the city. How much simpler it is to cook and clean when they haven’t got their husbands around checking up on things, asking them how much they paid for the roast, expecting their dirty shirts to be washed, ironed and put away as soon as they’ve been tossed in the direction of the laundry hamper.
All the women except for Nettie Shkurka and Lesia Baziuk, who have no husbands to worry about in the first place. And Nadia Senchenko, whose husband pays a housekeeper to do the things, Zirka always says, that any self-respecting woman wants to do for herself: grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning. But if Nadia Senchenko has missed performing any of these tasks, she doesn’t seem to be grieving, up in her cottage away from all the others—not a cottage but a House-Beautiful, with no one but herself to rattle round it the whole week long. What she can possibly find to do with herself all alone there, none of the women can guess; they spend hours and hours speculating on the subject, all except Sasha Plotsky, who is Nadia’s friend, and Sonia Martyn, who won’t say a word one way or another about Jack Senchenko’s wife.
A fly settles on Sonia as she lies sleeping in the hammock on the screened-in porch. Its feet move delicately over her collarbones and up the slope of her throat. It sits back and rubs its front legs together, preening itself, and then continues on its way. In her sleep, Sonia moves her hand to her neck—by the time the fly reaches her lips, she’s awake, wide awake, and she shoos it, her hand flapping in disgust. Startled, she looks at her wristwatch: it’s late, everyone else will be at Sasha’s already. But what on earth was she dreaming about when the fly woke her? If she holds tight to the edges of the hammock she’ll be able to pin it down, this dream that’s made her heart race and her head hurt. Dinner—she was late getting dinner, there were guests waiting, a man and a woman sitting at the table. The woman had no head and no arms: she was just a burlap torso, like a dressmaker’s dummy. The man had a pencil moustache and looked like Walter Pidgeon; he was plucking at the tablecloth as if he expected to find dirt underneath.
“Mr. Streatfield,” Sonia says out loud. “It was Mr. Streatfield.” Suddenly she’s remembering, with abrupt clarity, the day she told her boss she’d got herself engaged to Max Martyn. Mr. Streatfield had taken her out to lunch, not at the diner on Bathurst Street where he usually went, but to a restaurant with linen cloths and a rose in a skinny vase at every table. And he’d tried to talk her out of it. “What do you need a husband for, Sunny? You can have everything you need if you stick with me—I’ll even name the line after you: Sunny Sportswear, how’s that? Think of it, a house in California, an apartment in Manhattan—all the clothes, all the flowers and dinners out, all the money you could ever want. You’ll be in all the glossies—American Vogue, I guarantee it! Hell, you could even get into the movies!”
Sonia’s fingers loosen their hold on the hammock. Bees hum drowsily in the plants on either side of the porch steps; a bird calls out, making the sound of a door creaking on its hinges. She’s so grateful for this part of the day, when the children are out of her hair and nothing is expected of her. It’s too hot to do any work—leaves hang in the air outside as though suspended in syrup. If she were to lift her head and look directly out the screen, she would see the remnants of her mother’s vegetable garden. Every summer she’d come up and plant carrots and beets and lettuce for them: runner beans, garlic, dill, onions, carrots. So wouldn’t they always be running to the store, and because she couldn’t stand the sight of all this good earth going to waste. The year they bought the cottage she’d got down on her hands and knees, sixty-eight years old and yanking up weeds with her bare hands. The weeds had turned out to be poison ivy. Thank God Al Vesiuk had been there—he’d given her something to take care of the blisters, the oozing skin.
Sonia’s eyes swim with tears: sleek, useless tears. The doctor’s given her prescription after prescription that she never fills: sleeping pills, Valium. Sometimes she thinks that the only real thing in her life, the only real thing about her, is this ragged, unquenchable grief at her mother’s death. She gets up from the hammock and goes out to sit on the steps of the porch, a lean, tanned woman in faded blue shorts and a striped tube top exposing the delicate wingbones of her back. American Vogue. The movies … She wipes her eyes, makes a little grimace, frowns. The porch steps are rotting—Max has been promising for the past two years to replace them.
If her father were alive … He’d been a fine carpenter in his spare time; she still had a little cupboard, a sort-of treasure chest he’d made for her as a welcome gift when she’d come to Canada, this father she’d barely known, who’d left the Old Place when she’d been little more than a baby. Who’d been rushed to hospital a week after he’d met them at Union Station, having been injured by some brutal, overefficient machine at the foundry that employed him: no safety gear, no workers’ compensation, nothing. He’d recovered, somehow—even found work again because of the war, making shell casings to blow up the Fasheesty. And then, after the war had ended, and life had become slower and easier, and his children had married, and he’d held his first grandchild in his arms, a blood vessel had burst in his brain and he’d died twelve hours later. Never coming back to consciousness, unable even to tell them goodbye.
Sonia sits on the rotting steps and holds her head in her hands, weeping for her father, who’d widowed her mother far too young, and for the mother who’d died before her time. A baba—meaning old woman, granny—but to Sonia she was still that lonely young woman who’d read out letters from their father, letters all about the distant country where they, too, would go one day, once he’d made a home for them. A country so magical that no one used naphtha lamps and you could flood a room with light just by pushing a button! How could any of them have known how long it would take for them all to be together again, what with the Depression starting so soon after he’d crossed the ocean to that place that had sounded like the name of a kind of candy: Kanáda.
Sonia wraps her arms across her stomach, as if there were a huge stone there, or as if a huge stone had been dug out of her and she has to hold in the emptiness with her bare hands. It’s still only afternoon, and she can’t pretend away the eight endless hours till the children will be asleep for the night and she can climb into her bed as if it were a ship sailing away. From eternally damp bathing suits sagging on the line like flags of a conquered country; from the endless heaps of sand that get transferred from floor to dustpan to ground and then work their way back inside so there’s always grit under your shoes or eating away the enamel of the tub. If only you could do all the things that have to be done each day just once; if only you could marry your husband and have your children, and then climb on board a ship bound for nothing but the sea. There you’d stand, waving to the people gathered on the dock, waving once, twice, then making your way to the other side of the enormous ship, the side facing nothing but sky and water. Where the line between them dissolves, somehow, so that you’re not afraid of the water so far below you. Because there’s nothing, any more, to fear; everything’s turned to sky, the wind blowing past you, blowing right through you, as the ship moves off into a blue that isn’t emptiness or nothingness, but everything you’ve ever longed for …
Suddenly, clearer than she’s ever known them, clearer even than in life, Sonia sees her father and her mother. Where the vegetable garden used to be, there’s the boat, or part of it; they are standing on the varnished deck, their arms wound tight round one another, staring in her direction, but not waving, not calling—not seeing her at all. Sonia can’t help herself; she throws out her arms and calls to them, heedless of who might walk by and hear her, “Take me with you, don’t leave me here alone—oh, take me with you!”
Her words sail into the air like the planes her children make from folds of scrap paper. The bees hum and the fly that had crawled over her neck and up to her lips rubs its thick body against the screen. Sonia rubs her knuckles into her eyes, the way a small child does to try to staunch its tears.
There’s a loose piece in the latticework covering the foundations of the Plotskys’ cabin. Katia pushes open the wobbly wood as if it were a door and crawls inside. It is beautifully cool and there are no insects here except for the fat, white grubs which, as Tania points out, don’t do any harm to them or to the cracked tools and broken furniture shoved here for temporary storage and long forgotten. It’s Tania’s favourite hiding place, though she’s careful not to use it too often. It’s the best place to be when she wants to eavesdrop on her mother’s company.
This afternoon it’s the ladies from what Tania’s heard her mother call the Lending Library, though it’s not as though they come to the Plotskys’ cottage every Friday afternoon to read books. They are up on the porch over Tania and Katia’s heads, speaking English instead of the Ukrainian they always use when-the-kids-are-not-supposed-to-understand.
The ladies feel glamorous, slightly wicked speaking English together: for most of them it’s a second language and they feel not so much at home in it, as away. Away from their mothers and the examples set by those mothers: brave, hard-working women, all of them, but all too accepting of the sag of their skin and the folds ironed into their faces; of the flesh padding their hips and bellies, and the dumpy floral prints they wear, almost as uniforms. In the old country, a woman was old at forty: none of the tea drinkers at Kalyna Beach will confess to thirty-nine, except for prematurely grey-haired Annie Vesiuk, who’s more often to be seen in a swimsuit than anything like a housedress.
In a word, Sasha and the other members of the Lending Library are ladies—something their mothers would never care or want to be. Being a lady, however, is not inconsistent with gossiping, or listening to Sasha’s bawdy jokes, a fact for which the girls hidden beneath them are extremely thankful. Sometimes the talk is dull, nothing but casserole recipes, hem lengths, hairstyles. Last week, though, they’d got onto babies, having babies. “I was about to clean up the mess, scrape it into a bedpan and flush it away, when I saw there was something else there in all the blood, something alive. It was just a scrap, its heart hardly beating—hardly worth saving, we thought. But the doctor started working on it, and we managed to pull it through, though the damage, Bozhe miy!” This from Mrs. Vesiuk, who’d been a nurse before she got married. She had said right out loud, once, that Dr. Vesiuk had proposed to her on account of her big feet and wide hips: your pelvic floor, she’d said, and your shoe size are co-related, and as for big hips, everyone knows it makes having babies as easy as squeezing toothpaste from a tube. And then Mrs. Stechyshyn had talked about her Caesarean, which Katia had always thought was a kind of salad dressing until Tania told her how they take a knife and slit your belly, whisking out the baby still in its plastic bag.
Tania’s brought her Barbies along, in case there’s nothing useful to be overheard today. The Barbies are dressed in strapless satin evening gowns, with marabou trim. On their permanently arched feet are high-heeled pumps, the heels thinner than toothpicks. The girls have no interest in dressing up the Barbies; instead they strip off the dolls’ clothes, making faces at the smooth, bare plastic, the lack of hair and nipples that they know, thanks to the magazines at the smoke shop near their Ukrainian School, belong to any woman Barbie’s age. Above them, the ladies are going on about mumps and scarlatina, so the girls decide to play Marie Antoinette, marching the Barbies to the guillotine (a pair of scissors lifted from Sonia’s sewing basket). Katia holds the scissors open; just as she sends the blades crashing down to the imagined cheers of an equally imagined multitude, Tania snaps off Barbie’s head. It’s a delicate manoeuvre for which perfect timing is essential; the girls have become marvels of precision. Sometimes the blonde Barbie is Marie Antoinette and the brunette merely watches; other times, it’s she who’s marched off to the guillotine, while blonde Barbie plays Madame Lafarge, kicking away the popped-off head with a diminutive foot still in a powder-blue mule.
Over their heads comes the noise of a door slamming, and the chink of ice in glasses: Sasha’s brought out the gin and tonic. Most of the ladies come not just to brace themselves for their husbands’ arrivals from the city, but also to catch a glimpse of Nadia Senchenko, about whom they’re fiercely curious as well as jealous. They want to be able to tell their friends who are sweating out the summer in town how they have tea every Friday afternoon with the reclusive, the fastidious, the mysterious Nadia, wife of the only millionaire they are ever likely to know. Nadia, the Queen of the Rock of Gibraltar, as the kids have named the bluff on which the Senchenkos’ cottage stands, after the insurance company commercials on TV.
Tania pokes her friend’s shoulder: there’s been a drastic shift in the conversation: Katia’s aunt Zirka is speaking in her permanently shocked, girlish voice. “Is it any wonder, making that movie? Going off for a weekend together, leaving his wife and her husband behind. Of course they shared a bed, Annie—of course they spent their nights together, stark naked for all we know!”
“You think Liz Taylor wears baby dolls when she goes to bed with that stallion?” Halia Bozhyk laughs.
“You think they only go to bed together at night?” Sasha’s voice, cool as the ice cubes she’s splashing into the glasses.
“Darka does. Wears baby dolls, I mean.”
Katia’s ears prick—it’s her mother who’s said this, ignoring or diverting Sasha’s question.
“I told her it was the wrong thing for the cottage,” Sonia sighs, adjusting the dark glasses she wears to hide the redness of her eyes. “It gets cold at night. She said she didn’t have anything else to wear, but I know for a fact that Olya packed her some good flannelette nighties to bring up here.”
“Oh, Sunny, what does it matter what she sleeps in? Give the kid a break. As long as there’s no one dipsy-doodling in the sack with her, you don’t need to worry.”
The girls hear, or imagine, a little intake of breath, half guilty, half glad. Sasha says all the things no one else would dare to.
“But she lied to me, and God knows what she did with the nighties her mother made her. Olya’s not made of money, you know. And what does it tell you—a girl who’d lie about a thing like that?”
“Give it a rest, Sunny. She’s not your daughter, and you’ve done your best. Sometimes you just have to let nature take its course. If Darka wants to wear baby dolls and freeze her buns off, let her. The worst she’ll come down with is a cold. Especially if we do our bit—keeping our husbands’ hands away from her, I mean.”
This time the silence is like fat forming over gravy. Sonia clears her throat, and Nadia Senchenko asks Sasha if she has any limes.
“Just ReaLemon, sweetheart. Down here we’re peasants, remember?”
Zirka Metelsky makes a clucking sound, which the other women ignore. They’d all be happier if Zirka didn’t belong to the Lending Library, but Sasha’s insisted she be let in. A sharp one, Sasha, with a tongue like a razor, and yet she has a weakness for underdogs and pariahs; she always finds a place at the table for even the worst behaved of guests. And yet Zirka, with her eyes the colour of boiled gooseberries, her plump little body and flappy lips, always makes a show of being scandalized by Sasha’s talk, the liberties she takes with Nadia Senchenko, who, as Zirka never ceases to remind the women, is her brother’s wife. Never, in Zirka’s conversation, do you hear “Jack and Nadia” or “Jack this, Jack that,” but always “My Brother Jack.”
The ladies are sitting in a semicircle of folding chairs across from Sasha’s chaise longue, safe, snug, the gin making a warm fizz inside their heads. Their children are asleep, locked up in their cottages; their husbands are still miles and miles away, dinner a cloud of smoke on the horizon. Even the whine of mosquitos in their ears, the slaps they administer to themselves or one another with a Got ‘im! or Almost got ‘im! add to their relish in the one hour of their week that can be given the name of Leisure. There are six of them: Sonia, who’s come late; Zirka, wearing one of her husband’s shirts over her pedal-pushers, to keep the sun off her, though everyone knows it’s to hide the weight she’s put on over the winter. Annie, her hair cut short as a boy’s; Halia and Stefka, whom Sasha calls, right to their faces, the Siamese twins, because they think as well as talk and dress exactly alike, and are both married to men in the “medical business”—a pharmacist and a maker of dentures. Last of all, Nadia, her dark hair pulled into a chignon, and her black-rimmed glasses making her look like Nana Mouskouri, of whom even Zirka’s heard tell.
Of course there’s Sasha, too—Sasha the magician, who brings all the women together and keeps them in line, she says, by which she means holding on to the same rope, the one that gets them through each day and every night, the belief that they are all of them friends, neighbours, even sisters, through thick and thin—even distant Nadia, even loud-mouthed Zirka. It may be a short, thick rope, and it may be made out of hemp instead of silk, but it’s strong enough and it’s tied in a circle, tied and knotted by Sasha Plotsky’s hands. Sasha with her thick, brown, wavy hair that makes up for the pockmarks on her face, a constellation of scars from teenage acne. Remembering that gawky girl with a face full of fiery lumps, Sonia wonders how she ever turned into this arch-sophisticate, lying back in her chaise longue with her cigarettes, the gin she serves up instead of tea, her extravagant cheekbones and wide, red, wicked mouth. Sonia knows she ought to disapprove of Sasha, if only for the mess pouring out onto the veranda from inside the cabin: beach toys and hardcover books, their spines split open, cereal bowls with the toasted O’s crusted inside them, bathing suits lying in soggy pools instead of hanging neatly on the line.
The community has never quite known what to make of Sasha. Partly because her father wasn’t Ukrainian, or even Polish, but Russian, and thus the worst kind of enemy by old country standards. Partly because Sasha’s mother had suffered from some kind of wasting disease, which left her in no condition to rein in her wild and reckless daughter. But mostly because of Sasha’s father’s politics. Viktor Shcherbatsky was a Red; he’d marched with Tim Buck in the worst days of the Depression, and he’d got his daughter singing the “The Internationale,” hoisting a red banner and striding all the way down University Avenue one fine Labour Day during the war. The Catholic priest had called at the Metelskys’ house that very evening, warning them to keep away from Viktor Shcherbatsky and his family. If the Metelskys didn’t watch out, he warned, if they kept associating with such dangerous people, they’d be shipped back, once the war had ended, to toil on the collective farm that had gobbled up those narrow strips of land they’d left behind and never sold. Laryssa Metelsky had heard the priest out, she’d bid him good day, and she had kept on bringing pots of soup over to the Shcherbatskys, as Sasha’s mother became weaker and weaker, at last taking to her bed, and from there to the dark, narrow plot she’d managed to save up for in Prospect Cemetery.
Sonia lifts a plastic tumbler of watery gin to her mouth: just the smell of the liquor makes her giddy. “Ta deh!” she can hear her mother say. It was the only thing she’d said after the priest had left them with the stale bread of his warnings about the Shcherbatskys. Ta deh was her mother’s favourite expression, a cross between “no way” and “so what?” and a charm against that imagination of disaster that had scarred and so diminished her husband’s life. For Laryssa Metelsky had been a clear-eyed optimist, never letting herself worry past peevneech—midnight—the start of a new day. If only, Sonia thinks, she’d inherited her mother’s unshakeable confidence, instead of her father’s moods. “Ta deh,” Sonia whispers. Hadn’t her mother been right, after all? Neither Sasha nor her father had brought any grief to the Metelskys; even “The Internationale” had done Sasha no harm. True, when she’d run off aged nineteen with Ivan Plotsky, everyone had agreed it would be the end of her. But look where Ivan’s ended up: in advertising of all things, where the money’s even better than in law or dentistry!
Sasha has English friends in the city, women who do volunteer work for the Museum and the Art Gallery, in which most of the ladies on the veranda have never set foot. It’s as if these places were on far-off planets, the cool, thin air of which they could never hope to breathe. Sasha never goes to church; her kids have practically brought themselves up. Tania does much of the cooking now; Nick shovels out the house when things get too bad. Yet Sasha’s children adore her. Sonia would never want to be as slapdash and careless as Sasha, and yet she’d never be able to bear Kalyna Beach without her. What if Ivan decides he’s bored with the cottage—not a proper one at all, but a dark log cabin built some sixty years ago by a pair of lunatic spinsters who’d actually wintered-over in it? What if Ivan finally persuades Sasha they should sell the cabin and buy a farm instead, somewhere near Guelph or Newmarket? Where will the rest of them be? Minus dirty books and fast talk and Sasha’s hoarse, smoky laugh. Her splash and verve, which, time and again, Sonia takes in dumbstruck, like a kid at her first circus.
The ladies are back to talking about Cleopatra. A cigarette in her waving hand, Sasha holds forth:
“Rex Harrison’s all right—and some of the actors in bit parts, you know, Hume Cronyn and Roddy McDowall and, oh yes, oh my, Cesare Danova—now there’s a man! But Liz Taylor? Her idea of acting is to heave her boobs up and down.”
“No.” Silence follows on the heels of this single word, for it has been spoken by Nadia Senchenko—Nadia, who almost never speaks at Sasha’s tea parties, Nadia with her clear-as-crystal English from England.
“I disagree,” Nadia continues. “I think Taylor is convincing, in the first half, at least—a woman who knows exactly what she wants and means to have it. She’s in love, of course, but she also wants power, she’s capable of wanting power not just over a kingdom, but over her own life—”
“On your knees!” Sasha’s mimicry is perfect, if a bit abrupt: it’s as if she’s trying to shut Nadia up rather than encourage her. “Don’t we just wish we could tell our husbands that—and make them obey?”
“What about Burton?” Zirka pipes up. “What do you think about him, Nadia, about Dick and Sybil?” It’s as though she’s been waiting for a chance to spotlight her brother’s wife, to fix her centre stage.
Nadia does look a little like she’s on a film set, with her capri pants and silk shirt, and her hair twisted up on top of her head. She speaks as though Zirka’s question is a fly to be brushed away. “I think I prefer Shaw’s version of the story—and Shakespeare’s too, of course.”
The names Shaw and Shakespeare blow a chill among the women. Theatre for them is what happens in the church basement on Mother’s Day and Shevchenko’s birthday: poetry recitations, a little folk dancing, speeches. Except for Sasha and Nadia, of course, though Sasha’s never been to London-England, like Nadia. Ivan has taken her to New York and even to Los Angeles on business trips. Sonia’s been to New York, but that was as a runway model—they’d worked her so hard she hadn’t wanted to do anything but throw herself into bed at night, having pushed a chest of drawers against the door of her hotel room, as she’d promised her mother she’d do.
No one feels comfortable around Nadia except for Sasha. This is curious, considering that Nadia’s father was a professor of Religious Studies, and Sasha’s a Communist. It’s not that Sasha’s always running off to Nadia’s—Sasha doesn’t go anywhere much except down to the beach and back up to the cabin, trailing the smoke of her Export As, her face buried in whatever book she’s devouring at the moment. Nadia’s famous for being a loner and a night owl: they say she stays up till three or four in the morning, and sleeps in till lunchtime. All kinds of impossible rumours float in Nadia’s wake: that she goes swimming in the nude at midnight, that she lives off smoked oysters and sparkling wine, that she’s writing a book, though no one can swallow this last one. But still, where Sasha’s merely outrageous, Nadia’s mysterious: not romantic-mysterious, but opaque, frightening. She isn’t pretty at all, but there’s something about her that makes you want to look at her again and again, hoping she won’t look back. She used to draw a little, paint a little, before she got married, the ladies seem to remember. And now she’s enrolled for a degree at the University of Toronto, where her son will be starting Engineering in the fall: he’s smart as well as rich, Jack Jr: he’s skipped two grades at that fancy school they sent him to. Nadia’s supposed to be studying for her courses while she’s up here—there are reports of textbooks lying all over her cottage: books on the history of art, of all things, and expensive reproductions of work by the Old Masters. It makes Sonia nervous. Nadia could tell you exactly what and who an Old Master was, without blinking an eye; Sonia, on the other hand, never had a chance to get past grade six, in either her old or her new country. Once Katia caught her writing waistpaper basket on a shopping list and looked at her as if she were a beggar. Clever, pretty Katia, who’d rather spend her time in Sasha’s sloppy home than helping her own mother; Katia, who worships her father and declares she wants to be a lawyer when she grows up, or even a judge.
“—better than The Robe,” Stefka’s saying. “He was in that too, with Jean Simmons, remember?”
“I liked him best in The Rains of Ranchipur,” Halia sighs. “With Lana Turner. They put some kind of brown dye on his skin—he plays an Indian prince, and it’s so sad when—”
“He’s a weakling,” Zirka blurts out. “He’s let that Taylor woman make a spectacle out of him. The way she flaunts herself—”
“We’re supposed to be seen and not heard?” Sasha hits back, doling out the remains of the gin, a teaspoon each, into the ladies’ glasses.
Annie Vesiuk wades in now. “But, Zirka, she’s a movie star! It’s her job to make things spectacular.” It’s just like Annie to want to smooth things over. Annie’s the perfect sport, a blue-ribbon mother. She doesn’t have a jealous bone in her body, Annie, though her husband must see a hundred nurses every day, and you know what men are like, even the best of them. Annie who wears no makeup, and makes no effort to hide the varicose veins snaking up her calves and thighs—such muscular legs, Sonia thinks, pitying her a little, but envious, too, of how strong Annie is, how tireless, cooking, cleaning, wiping noses, rinsing out endless diapers and bathing suits, never complaining. Eight boys, as well as a mother-in-law in permanent residence. You and Annie should trade recipes.
“Any woman,” Zirka continues, leaning in, her round face reflected in Nadia Senchenko’s dark glasses, “any woman who could walk out on her husband, the father of her children, in order to chase after another woman’s husband, is plain indecent. Even the Pope’s condemned her—’a woman of loose morals,’ that’s what he’s called her. Don’t take my word for it, you can read it for yourselves in the Catholic Times!”
“I can understand being married twice,” Sonia ventures, “if you’ve been widowed. But four husbands, and now five, if he gets his divorce?”
“One died—don’t forget that,” Stefka volunteers. “Mike Todd, he was something in the movies, not an actor, a producer. It was tragic—he was the love of her life.”
“Of course he was,” Sasha jumps in. “He gave her a $90,000 diamond bracelet as a wedding present.”
“I can’t remember husband number one—he was somebody’s son, somebody wealthy, maybe in real estate.” This from Stefka, catching the ball from Sasha: the women are trying to keep Zirka from getting back on her high horse.
“And then Mike Todd,” Halia adds. “He died in a plane crash.”
“No, no, Michael Wilding—the Anhleeyetz—the gentleman. She made mincemeat out of him, all right,” Sasha grins.
“And then Mike Todd, and after that Eddie Fisher. But she didn’t have any children by Eddie Fisher.” Stefka speaks with surprising authority. “There was that article in Life—do you remember the pictures of her little boys and the girl, asking who their daddy’s going to be this time?”
“She can’t have any more kids, did you know that?” Annie says sadly, as someone says Shh, and there’s a pause, during which Annie blushes, remembering that Zirka, too, has had her problems making babies.
Zirka dashes into the breach. “Eddie Fisher has kids of his own—and a wife in a million. Debbie Reynolds—she can out-act Elizabeth Taylor any day of the week!”
“Neither of them is exactly Sarah Bernhardt,” Sasha observes.
“Debbie Reynolds is a lady,” Zirka trumpets. “Taylor’s nothing but a you-know-what!” And then, taking a step towards Nadia, addressing her words to no one but Nadia, she pounces: “Any woman—any decent woman would be satisfied with one husband, especially if he’d given her children and enough money to get by on. More than enough. So what is she after? I’ll tell you: she’s only after—”
The ladies aren’t listening to Zirka any more. They are too busy watching Nadia as she rises calmly from her chair and goes to lean against the railing, turning her back to them all.
“Sex!” Zirka cries, so shrilly that the girls under the veranda bite their lips, trying not to give themselves away in their delight. “It’s nothing but sex. It’s dirty and selfish and disgusting.” And now, with Nadia turning her back on her, Zirka trains her volleys on her hostess. “Just like those books of yours, Sasha Plotsky—you ought to be ashamed of yourself, passing them around. What if the children get their hands on them?”
Sonia’s face goes red as a bowl of borshcht. Half of the things in those books make her squirm, and the other half go straight over her head. Death by Desire. She ought to be passing that one on, now, to Halia or Annie. She can’t imagine Annie reading them—maybe she doesn’t need to, having been a nurse.
Sasha starts piling glasses on a scratched aluminum tray. “I don’t notice you saying no to all those disgusting books, Zirka.”
“You want me to bury my head in the sand? You want it so that I don’t know what’s going on under my very nose?”
“Shh, Zirka, it’s crazy to make such a fuss, and over what? A movie star, a woman none of us even know!” Annie has stretched out her hand, is pressing Zirka’s plump little knee.
Zirka shakes her off. And then, without taking another step, she crosses the line the ladies have drawn so carefully around their reading and gossip and the lives they lead from day to day in the confines of Kalyna Beach. “Ask Nadia,” Zirka shrieks. “Ask Nadia what she thinks about women who lead on other people’s husbands!”
The ladies look down at their feet in their flip-flops and frayed sneakers. They are all remembering—how can they not?—the party on this very veranda last Saturday night, the get-together hosted by the Plotskys and graced by the Senchenkos. Zirka is exaggerating, as she always does. Peter got a little drunk, that’s all. Everyone had been having a wonderful time, lots of laughing and teasing and more than a little tippling, when suddenly there was a noise like a gunshot: the unmistakable sound of a hand smacking a face. And there had been Peter Metelsky, looking as startled as anyone; he’d been kneeling before Nadia Senchenko, his hand over his heart, his eyes staring up into hers. He’d been reciting some nonsense from Cleopatra, pretending he was Marc Antony before Egypt’s beauteous Queen, or some such foolishness. After the slap, he’d gone through the motions of a rejected suitor, his forearm to his brow, his head all hangdog. Vaudeville, pure vaudeville. Everyone had laughed, especially Jack, who’d slapped Peter on the back, and told Nadia he’d find her an agent. The whole veranda-ful of people had laughed, and shrugged, and relaxed again.
Of course it was nothing to worry about—it was only Peter hamming it up, for old times’ sake. And Nadia, bored with his attentions, maybe a little under the weather, or the least bit sozzled, had let him have it. She’d felt insulted, ridiculed: Nadia’s no Cleopatra, and the one person she bears no resemblance to whatsoever is Elizabeth Taylor, with her violet eyes and double row of eyelashes, and a bosom large and quivery as angel food cake. Everything had settled down, no one had bothered to talk or fuss about it until now, with Zirka determined to make a scene, bang her shoe on the table, force a response of some kind from poor Nadia.
Nadia is still leaning out over the railing, staring at the lake. Slowly, she turns round so that she’s facing them all. She takes off her glasses, and her dark, myopic eyes blink helplessly, unable to focus on any one of the faces before her.
“I was thinking,” she says at last, “about our Labour Day party, our zabava. You’ll all be coming, won’t you?”
It is, of course, the perfect response—the only possible reply. And the ladies, who are staring at Nadia as though she were some master-diplomat brokering a peace treaty among half a dozen warring states, fall into line. Of course, they tell her. Of course they’re coming to Nadia and Jack’s zabava. Even Zirka nods, biting her lips as if she enjoyed the taste. Who could possibly miss a party—the party—at the Senchenkos’ cottage? Nadia slips her glasses back on again and leaves her half-full tumbler on the dented tray before nodding goodbye to Sasha and the rest of them, and walking down to the shore.
The ladies watch her graceful progress until she’s vanished from their sight. Sasha gets up from her chaise longue and throws her cigarette over the railing. From their vantage point under the latticework, Katia and Tania watch it burn down into the sand.
“Ladies,” Sasha says, in her throaty voice, “the gin’s all gone and our husbands will be home before we know it. I haven’t got a clue whether my kids are where they’re supposed to be, or whether they’ve gone off and got themselves drowned.”
Halia and Stefka, Annie and Sonia, still-smouldering Zirka—they all unpeel themselves from their chairs, rising a little unsteadily. One by one they take their leave, Sonia last, about to hide the fact that she’s still got a glass full of watery gin by spilling it into the bushes off the veranda. Before she can do so, Sasha’s taken the incriminating object from her hands, and Sonia feels more than ever like the youngest in the group, the one who isn’t fully accepted, the tagalong.
“Stay for a minute, will you?” It’s not a request, nor yet an order, but a plea.
“I can’t, Sasha, I’ve got to get the kids to the beach.”
“It’s important, Sonechko. We need to talk. Inside.”
When the veranda stops shuddering over their heads, its planks holding nothing but the shadows of empty chairs, Katia and Tania creep out from under, their legs stiff as dresses ironed till they scorch.
“What do you think is going on?” Tania whispers. “Do you suppose old Maximoynko told on us?”
“So what if she did? We didn’t take anything. She didn’t catch us, did she?”
Tania doesn’t answer. She’s thought of something else, now, some other trouble they could be blamed for. Billy Baziuk on the porch steps, playing with himself. She looks up at Katia, who’s been thinking the same thing.
“It’s not about him,” Katia says. “Nobody saw that but us.”
“How do you know? Maybe his mother did—she’ll say it’s our fault. And our mothers will think we’re just as bad as he is, they always do.”
The girls stare at one another, and shrug. Then they spit into the palms of their right hands and clap those hands together, folding and interlacing their fingers. It’s their ritual of friendship—more than friendship, or even sisterhood. It’s their sign that they’ll remain loyal to each other till death do us part. Down in the dark beneath the porch, the Barbies are stuck like scissors in the earth, and the scissors lie forgotten, blades pressed primly together, trying to gleam.
The cottage is as quiet as if Martians had landed and carried everyone away. Sonia’s off at the Plotskys’, Bonnie and Alix are fast asleep; Darka’s slumped on the sofa with a Hollywood Romance slipping out from a Life magazine. But she’s not reading, and she’s certainly not looking at the bright blue spill of lake through the picture window put in with such labour and at such expense the year before. Perhaps she’s asleep—yes, Laura decides, Darka’s dozing, which is far better than she’d hoped for. As for Katia, who cares where she’s off to as long as she’s not here?
In her parents’ room, on the makeshift vanity table with its faded cotton skirts and rough, plywood top, lies Sonia’s paltry array of makeup. Three tubes of lipstick standing like soldiers in their shiny golden tubes: Pretty Pink, Koral Kiss, Ice Peach. A round container of face powder: MADAME DUBARRY under the picture of a lady with a pale satin dress and grey hair puffy as a mushroom. Inside, the powder puff smells the slightest bit sour, as if it should be left in the sun instead of shut up in a box, in the pale, pink dark. When Laura puts back the lid, a rim of powder sighs onto the table: she picks it up on her fingertips, rubbing it along her nose to make it look longer, finer, as the magazines advise. Her mother doesn’t wear eye makeup—she says it’s cheapening and besides, her eyelashes are naturally dark and thick. No fingernail polish, either. Sonia’s father had made her promise she would never paint her nails; it’s one of the stories each of her daughters but the youngest knows by heart, and Alix will learn it soon enough. How, the morning that Dyeedo Metelsky noticed, on the tips of his daughter’s hands, ten blood-red ovals, he’d brought over a basin of scalding, soapy water, demanding she wash that poison off immediately and never even think of painting herself again!
Laura frowns, wishing there was something here she could use to transform herself, something scarlet or gold or inky-black. She can’t bring herself to put Sonia’s lipstick on her mouth; it would be too much like having to kiss her mother in company, showing what an obedient, affectionate child she is. Even if there were any eye makeup she could put on, it would all be hidden by her glasses, and if she were to take off her glasses she wouldn’t be able to see what she looked like in the mirror. Why is she the only one of them all to be short-sighted? Baba Laryssa wore glasses, but that doesn’t help: Sonia always looks at her daughter’s eyes as if Laura had ruined them just to spite her. Why couldn’t Katia have been the one needing to sit closer and closer to the television screen, and to the blackboard at school?
Baba Laryssa’s glasses had had small, thick, rimless lenses: when she took them off, her eyes looked naked and so raw they made Laura think of an onion cut in half. When she’d first seen Laura in glasses, Baba had told her to take them off as often as she could, so her eye muscles wouldn’t get lazy. But once the lenses had slid over her eyes and the world jumped into sharp, stinging focus, Laura could never be without them. She’d even tried to wear her glasses to sleep, in case there was a fire in the middle of the night, and she needed to see to escape the flames. Now her eyes are so weak she can see next to nothing without her glasses, only blots by day, and blurred circles of light by night. Her mother has perfect vision, and her father has eagle eyes—that’s how he made it through the war, he says: he could see the snipers before they fixed their sights on him.
A fly bumbles against the screen, trying to get out through holes far too small; it’s too stupid to notice the rip farther up, through which it flew in. Too stupid, or else its eyes are bad, like Laura’s. She turns away from the mirror, running her hand over the curved iron footboard of the double bed. How can it be so cool against her palm when this room is so hot, the air so thick and stuffy? She tries to imagine her father lying sleeping here tonight, his body like the prince disguised as a bear in “Snow White and Rose Red.” Once she’d come into her parents’ room when she wasn’t supposed to; had seen her father coming out of the bath, a tall, heavy body with pads of dark fur all over it. She couldn’t imagine how her mother could fall asleep beside a man who looked like a bear. Brown hair on the backs of his hands and springing out of his open shirt; dark brown eyebrows and hair so thick on his head, he’d joke about taking the lawn mower to it. Not bald like Mr. Plotsky, who is always mopping his shiny scalp with a pocket handkerchief, but thick dark hair combed straight back from his forehead.
When she was younger, Laura believed that her father unzipped his skin every night; that he stepped out of his pelt the way he’d step out of his car coat after shovelling snow. She believed that her mother had some special gown she wore at night, stiff as armour, thin as silk, to keep her from being eaten up by the bear. Laura was very, very stupid once; she knows that now. Sliding open the closet door, not to touch anything, only to look, she drinks in the good, dry smell of the lavender talc her father always buys her mother for Christmas. It’s concentrated, this scent, in the clothes left hanging so sadly on their hangers, as if their only joy lay in hugging Sonia’s skin. The closet, unlike the vanity table, is packed full: shorts, skirts, pedal-pushers and blouses all in bright, cool colours, a garden of flowers hung by their metal stems. Thoughtlessly, Laura pushes farther and farther into the deep, narrow closet, feeling the texture of the cloth: satiny, or nubbly, or gauzy. Until she comes to the very end, to something that feels like nothing else under her fingers. She pulls at it, tugging it past the other clothes till at last she holds it up to her eyes, a long shimmer of gold. The dress Cleopatra wore on her triumphal entry into Rome, bringing her son Caesarion to be crowned.
Gingerly, Laura holds up the dress, her legs in their usual knock-kneed lock. In the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door she confronts her body. It’s an entirely different shape from her mother’s. It’s more, she knows, like a tub of lard than an hourglass, and the collarbones which, on Sonia, project like a pair of budding wings are swallowed up by fat—puppy fat, Laura’s heard her mother call it. So—a dog in a tub of lard, that’s what she looks like, but somehow it doesn’t matter with this dress. There’s no waist to it; the material expands to cover her, seems to melt the thickness of her waist and thighs. If she were to step into it, she would become Cleopatra: everything about her would change, would turn clear and sharp, the way the world had done when she’d first put on her glasses. Outside, a squirrel starts chittering as she pulls the dress over her head, not even bothering to tug off her shorts and her top, fighting down the panic she always feels when she’s getting dressed, as if the cloth is out to smother her.
It looks all wrong; it looks ridiculous. Because of the bra sewn into the material, foam cups like pointy balloons: if you press them they collapse like those cakes at the store, the ones Katia and Tania spoil by pushing down the maraschino cherries. If she could take out the foam cups, it would fit, it would have to fit; it would be perfect. She tugs the dress back over her head, trying not to panic when the cloth sticks; she grabs the scissors from her mother’s sewing basket under the vanity—the big, clumsy ones, since the smaller set is missing—and presses a steel tip against the tight, white stitching binding the foam to the gold lamé.
Once all the other ladies have gone, and they are on their own inside the Plotskys’ dark, low-ceilinged cabin, Sonia attempts to deflect the urgency of Sasha’s summons. She pre-empts her with a question: Does Sasha think it’s normal, this obsession their daughters have with their bodies? For Tania and Katia are always going on about breasts and bras, right in front of everyone.
“Of course it’s harmless,” Sasha sighs, lighting another cigarette, shaking the match out and exhaling in that actressy way of hers. “If they were boys they’d be comparing the size of their wienies, and seeing who could pee the farthest. I’d much rather have them discussing how big their boobs are going to be than worrying that they don’t have a penis, wouldn’t you?”
Sonia makes no reply—she’s remembering the sight of Darka in a halter top: at sixteen, the girl has bigger breasts than Sonia’s were when she was breast-feeding. And then she blushes, thinking of how, with all her movie magazines, sixteen-year-old Darka knows more about sex than she had known on her wedding day. Men are like that. Like what? You’ll find out.
“Look,” Sasha declares, “that’s the least of our worries.” She rests her cigarette in one of the asbestos ashtrays Nick or Tania have made in Arts and Crafts at school.
Sonia watches the cigarette burn itself down: though she disapproves of smoking, she also thinks it extravagant, letting all that good tobacco go to waste. Sasha sighs, and Sonia blushes: she’s convinced Sasha can read her thoughts. Sasha-the-Gypsy, the one who knows everything about them all.
“You saw that performance Zirka just put on,” Sasha begins. “Why was she on the attack like that—in public, in front of the whole damn Lending Library, for Christ’s sake? She’s had a whole week to ask Nadia what was going on between her and Peter—if there was anything going on, that is, other than Peter being even more of an idiot than he always is.”
“Don’t, Sasha. You don’t know him, you don’t understand—”
“All I understand is that Zirka’s onto something that we’ve been too stupid, or too lazy, to notice. She may not be a rocket scientist, but she’s nobody’s fool. She’s nosed something out between Nadia and Peter and she wants us to know about it—wants Nadia to know that we know. She’s made that clear enough.”
“He got a little drunk, that’s all,” Sonia says. “He got a little drunk, and he started acting, the way he always does. For God’s sake, Sasha, it’s been twenty years—”
“Eighteen, by my reckoning. But forget Peter for a moment. Let’s focus on Nadia. For her to have acted so out of character, to have shown her feelings like that—she might as well have blown a trumpet or shouted from the rooftops, as slap Peter’s face.”
“Doesn’t that just go to show it was all a joke, just like Peter’s ham-acting?”
Sasha puts her hands to her head. “I wish I could believe that, Sonechko, I wish I had the least goddam clue as to what is going on here. Nadia hasn’t been herself all summer—since before the summer. She’s always been so remote, so perfectly controlled. And Peter—if he’d just been drunk and full of himself, he would have thrown himself at me, or Annie, or even Zirka. But he went after Nadia. He went out of his way to make a fool of himself and a spectacle of Jack Senchenko’s wife.”
“You’re starting to sound like Zirka,” Sonia says.
“Don’t I know it,” Sasha moans. “But listen, Sonechko, you’ve got to help me with this: it’s important.”
Sonia nods, and Sasha speaks, but her words drift about Sonia’s head like the furred parachutes of dandelion seeds. Sasha has given her a headache with her cigarettes and suggestions. The only way to keep her balance is to think of something else, which she manages to do, though it doesn’t keep her head from hurting. A picture of the broken statue flashes into her mind, or rather, the moment of the statue’s breaking, the moment it started to fall from its place on the mantelpiece, the lines along which it would smash already shivering. And then, on its heels, comes an image of Baba Motria’s kylym, woven back in the old country and transported, at such cost and trouble and for such small purpose, to the new. Sonia has always hated that kylym. Max’s mother had given it to her just before she died, expecting it to be hung in the place of honour on the living room wall. Instead, Sonia had laid it down in the rec room, where the children had worn holes in it, driving their tricycles over it. Max has never said a word about the banishment of the kylym: he too dislikes it. There is something so constricted about the weave, so dismal about the black background and the pink and orange roses—for all the world like two-day-old funeral flowers.
Sonia is holding the two things in her head: the shattered plaster statue, so frivolous in its uselessness and fragility, and the rugged, worn kylym, shelved in the basement. It will outlive them all, she thinks, its weave as strong as her memory of the river in the Old Place, the deadly urgency of its current.
“Do you get it now, Sonia? Do you understand why this is so important?” Sasha is pleading once again, this time almost angrily.
Sonia nods, yes, oh yes, though to what, exactly, she really can’t say. Speak to Peter: of course she will speak to Peter, this very weekend.
“I have to go,” she says, moving to the door, putting her hand on the latch.
Once down the veranda steps and back on Tunnel Road, she exhales deeply, as if it had been she, not Sasha, lighting up.
Darka’s curlers are the hard kind, filled with stiff bristles and fastened with plastic pins like bayonets, for all they’re such a pallid pink. She’d wanted foam rubber; it was too expensive, her mother said, but that wasn’t the real reason—Darka holds out her hand, scrutinizing fingernails naked as earthworms—the real reason was that her mother had wanted to punish her. Wait till you have a daughter and she goes wild and breaks your heart, after all you’ve dreamed for her, done for her.
What’s the point? Who is here to look at her fingernails except Sonia, who’d have a fit if Darka were to paint them up? She might as well have shaved her head as bleached her hair—who is there to care? Dead and buried, that’s what she is; she might as well throw herself into the lake, walk out into the water with a ball and chain around her leg. At home they’ll all be going to the Hot Spot for Cherry Cokes and cheeseburgers tonight: if she were home, Jamie would pick her up in his red convertible, his black-and-white dog in the back seat, the radio blasting. They’d drive all over town and she wouldn’t get home till after one. She’d have to sneak into her room by climbing the fence and then jumping up into the Manitoba maple right outside her window. All the next day her mother would walk around with swollen eyeballs, showing off how she’s been sobbing her heart out over her wayward daughter. Olya doesn’t need to worry, make herself sick over nothing; if she had half a brain she’d know that. But how can Darka tell her? There’s no language between them any more, no shared hopes or plans, however much Darka wants to escape from the kind of life her mother’s led, and however much Olya dreams of a future for her daughter, a life not dissimilar, in fact, to Sonia Martyn’s.
Darka drums with her fists on her thighs, then pushes her palms over the cloth of her shorts, fingers outspread like powerboats, idling. She thinks of the city, how good she feels with the hardness of pavement under her feet, and a thousand shop windows to pore over when she skips a day off school and walks around downtown for hours on end. She is thinking of the attention she gets, not just wolf whistles but looks of interest, admiration from men in costly suits and well-cut sports jackets. All of a sudden, Darka smiles; her pretty face burns with something like beauty. All because of this feeling she has, more than a hunch, a glow that starts in her toes and spreads itself through her whole body. Sometimes she feels it give off this golden hum as she’s walking down the street or into a room, or when she just sits, as she’s doing now, waiting. The golden hum tells her she is somebody special, that no harm can ever come to her, that wonderful things are about to happen. She won’t end up in a dump on Bathurst, like her mother; she’s headed for far-off places, she’ll wear orchids and a snakeskin dress; men will leap to light her cigarette in its ebony holder. Lean, handsome men always at her elbow, lighters clicking, her face reflected in their eyes, in the satin trim of their dinner jackets.
Nonsense, her mother calls it, dime-novel romance, nothing but daydreaming. Sonia’s word for it is loafing; she’s always on at her for loafing on her bed with her movie magazines. Loafing! When all she wants, Darka assures herself, is to work: real work for real pay. She could have got that job at the Hot Spot: she could have made big money this summer instead of the pennies Sonia’s doling out, not to her, but to Olya, to spend on school supplies and a new uniform for Darka’s last year at Saint Demetrius. Why didn’t they just slap her in reform school, instead? Good as jail here—nothing to do except slave over a washtub or a sink and run after the kids, rude, mouthy, even the baby a handful. Alix hardly ever sleeps for more than an hour in the afternoon, and it spooks her sometimes, the kid never talking, never making a sound, hardly even laughing or crying—and they think she’s dumb just because she failed her year!
When Darka had bleached her hair, Sonia lit into her as if she’d robbed a bank. Beauty’s only skin deep; men look for more than glamour in a woman; sex isn’t everything; you want to be looking out for a respectable man, the steady kind that talks marriage. Well, she’s not even thinking about getting married yet, she has a life—doesn’t anyone here understand that? She’d rather die than marry a lawyer or accountant and be buried with a pack of kids at a cottage for eight weeks every summer. They think they’re so smart with their advice, and their frowns, and the click-cluck of their tongues. They think they know everything and they haven’t a clue. She’ll show them, won’t she just? But how, marooned as she is among mothers and children? She could have been spending the summer with Jamie Ashford. She says his name aloud, loving the Englishness of it, the soft cadence of the normal-sounding name. He knows her as Darlene. She’s never told him her last name: she’s never had to. All he has to do is look at her and she can feel his eyes turn into the warm palms of his hands, sliding over her shoulders, down to her breasts.
Darka sinks back against the sofa, as deep as the curlers will allow. Closing her eyes, she puts both hands to her face, the bones of her cheeks and jaw, the roundness of her throat. She holds her breasts, stroking them with her thumbs through the thin cotton, as if they were her only friends in all the world, the only ones who understand her and love her no matter what she does. All golden, orchids, his lighter so close that if she were to stick out her tongue instead of the cigarette she would catch fire, burn, burn up altogether.
A candy on the pillow beside her: a red candy, smaller than the nail on her baby finger. Alix touches it so gently she can hardly tell if it’s smooth or sticky. Candy hearts her sisters give her—stick out your tongue—laying them on the very tip. She has to flick them into her mouth so they don’t drop in the dirt. Never, ever eat things that fall on the floor, they’re poison.
Poi-son. Ot-ru-ta. Heart. Ser-tseh. Red. Cher-vo-na. Alix watches the words fly in pairs, English and Ukrainian, across the sky inside her head. Where her mouth is, there’s a window, dangerous; the birds think they can fly through it, they throw themselves so hard against the glass they break their wings and have to limp back to their roosting place. Pulling their heads in small, so small that no one can find them.
On her pillow a candy, like a cinnamon heart, the kind that burns on your tongue. A candy, but no sugar smell like the one her mother sprays on her neck; she pushes the pump, a cloud comes out and makes a smell like candy. This one has black spots so small she has to blink to see them, pushing with her finger. It stops being a candy: hairs shoot out its sides, black hairs like the ones round your eyes. Alix watches the red spot push itself up her finger, tickling her skin. Lets it crawl up one finger to the finger on her other hand, climbing up and over, like on the monkey bars at the school when they’re waiting for Bonnie. Up to her arm, meeting the fence her finger makes, and down again, and up and down. Till she holds it to her mouth and blows, gently. Two small, dark scarves shoot out from the red, a buzzing sound, and it’s gone, her finger bare now, nothing.
If she knew its name she could call it back. When her mother wants them she calls and they have to come; even if they run away, their names catch up with them. Names can’t catch you till you say them out loud; you must never, never let them go, you must keep them safe inside, heads tucked tight, blind, under their wings. But that small, red crawling thing—not a fly, flies buzz—she wants it back, she wants to keep it. Pushing down off the bed, her feet meeting the sand on the floor. Little lines up and down all over the windows, little squares where the flies crawl, they get trapped inside; Katia squishes them with her bare fingers. Katia, that’s dis-gus-ting. Not fly, not mukha, that’s not its name. When she finds it she’ll hold out her finger, whisper it back to her hand: carry her hand to her mouth, and the thing will step with its small, small feet onto her tongue; she’ll close her mouth and keep it forever, flying inside her.
Darka and Laura hear it at the same time, through different walls: a crashing sound from the baby’s room, smack of wood against wood. Darka jumps up from the sofa and runs to where Baby Alix has fallen from the chair she’s dragged to the window. Darka holds her and lets her wail, a gush of sound you could almost mistake for words; maybe it’s the way she speaks, thinks Darka, singing to her, taking the baby’s hands and clapping them together: toshi, toshi, toshi, svynya v horodi. Till the child forgets what she’s crying for, listening to the nursery rhyme, watching the face of the grown-up girl, the girl who talks and talks and talks, words flapping out her mouth, disappearing forever.
Laura stays frozen in her mother’s room, sitting on the floor, her back against the bed, the scissors gleaming in her lap. At the sound of the crash, the scissors forgot the small nick they were taking out of the tight, white stitch; they jabbed into the cloth, fine and slippery as her hair but golden, shining. Now there’s a hole she can never patch up. Alix keeps wailing, sounds flooding out of the mouth that makes Laura think of the mail slot in the front door at home, not a mouth at all, not something that belongs to Alix’s body, but something hard and metallic stamped down on her. Darka’s heavy footsteps, the door to Alix’s room banging shut, and then Darka singing nonsense rhymes, making baby-talk against the baby’s silence, now that the shock is over.
So it wasn’t Sonia coming home, the smash she’s heard: but what does it matter? As soon as she does comes home, she’ll know. If Sonia went crazy about the breaking of a useless statue, then she will kill Laura over the dress, just for taking it off its hanger. Laura grips the scissors in her sweaty hands; now that she’s started she’s got to finish; maybe her mother won’t notice the foam cups are gone, maybe she’ll think it looks better this way. Laura stabs the blade into the tight white stitches, breaking them one by one, breaking their little necks. Until at last the foam falls into her lap, and the dress stops being a dress, is just a pool of something bright, a loose skin that can hardly cling to its hanger as she shoves it to the back of the closet.
Now the screen door slams; now her mother’s really back from Sasha’s tea party, calling to them all to get ready to go back to the beach. Laura manages to steal out before anyone sees that she’s been in Sonia’s room. And all the while, in the dark press of the closet, her mother’s dress runs its hands up and down itself, learning the holes slashed into its skin.
“Didn’t you hear her?” Darka shouts from the kitchen, as Laura runs out the door and across the lawn, disappearing behind the sleep-house, where she stoops and pushes a bundle of hacked sponge-rubber and short, ripped threads under the foundation blocks.
From the top of the dunes, where she’s come to find her children, Sasha looks down to the beach, her shadow streaming away from her in the afternoon sun like a lightly fastened banner. She puts her hand to her eyes, counting heads, finding Tania and Katia at last at the very edge of the lake, letting the small waves roll in over their legs and splash up to their waists. The boys seem to have set up camp on Australia, where the driftwood log is pulled up like a delivery van—there’s Nick’s red head flaming among all the brown and black and blond heads of this summer’s crop of boys. What are they plotting, far away from their sisters and mothers? Most likely they’re chanting that silly song Nick brought back the other day, driving Tania crazy by singing it over and over, in a whining, baby voice:
What’s your name, little boy?
My name is Lemmie.
Lemmie what, little boy?
Lemmie kiss you.
No doubt it will be kissing parties next—did those come before or after playing doctor? Sasha decides it doesn’t matter, not at this age.
She should call out to her kids, round them up, organize a massive cleanup of the cottage before Ivan gets in. A cleanup whose effects will last a few hours or so: a day if they’re lucky. Entropy, Sasha long ago decided, is her native element. Then why is she so determined to keep everyone together, everyone where they belong at Kalyna Beach? “Everyone” being the couples who are her friends and more—her family, she supposes. Family into which you are born and that you adore or worry over or put up with, as the case may be. Nadia, Peter, Zirka: triangle heaven. How can Sonia be so blind?
But maybe she’s right, Sasha thinks, stubbing her cigarette out in the sand and folding her arms in that defiant way she picked up from her father. Maybe the best thing is to be dumb, and blind, and deaf; to let things play out and get back to normal, as they always do. Maybe what had happened with Nadia slapping Peter, and Zirka laying into Nadia, was just the usual combination of liquor and hot weather and boneheadedness. Zirka’s histrionics might just have been a way of showing how important she thinks she is, how much her feelings matter—have to be made to matter. How had Peter stood it all these years?
“Ah, but she can cook,” Sasha says out loud, shaking her head. She starts wondering, as she always does at this time of day, how she is ever going to sling a meal together, and whether she can get away with serving Ivan hot dogs for dinner. The kids have eaten them four nights in a row, but that’s fine with them, they won’t even notice.
No one will notice, everything will be fine. Sasha decides she’s too tired to think anything else, right now, as she unfolds her arms and takes a last look over the lake. She wonders, again, what the boys could be getting up to, all of them clumped together like that. Maybe it’s nothing so innocent as a song about kissing. After that episode at the service station last week—setting fire to a roll of tarpaper, thank God the owner had been working late, had seen what they’d got up to, though they’d all run away before he’d been able to put his hands on even one of them. Thank God, again, Sasha thinks, for she’s not at all sure that Nick hadn’t had a hand in lighting the match. The fathers had read them the riot act, forbidden them to go anywhere near the service station, which meant that the boys now had to bribe their sisters or cousins to fetch them their contraband from Venus Variety: jawbreakers and Popsicles and wax shaped like a jawful of teeth, with some kind of syrup inside.
What would Sonia ever have done with boys? Sasha wonders. Maybe they would have cured her, once and for all, of her fearfulness, her lack of confidence, her habit of always looking at the wrong side of the cloth. Although where Peter’s concerned—but Sasha stops herself; she’s had her little talk with Sonia, there’s no point going over that ground again. And so she heads back to the cabin, whistling a Cole Porter tune she especially likes, and thinking that before she starts supper, she’ll plow through one more chapter of the book she’d been reading just before the ladies dropped by for tea.
On the rock they call Australia, Yuri Metelsky is launching the Cossack Brotherhood of Kalyna Beach. Australia, he announces, will henceforward be known as the Seech, after the island fortress established by the Zaporozhian Cossacks in the sixteenth century, or seventeenth; he can’t remember which. It’s not so much of a stretch to convert Georgian Bay into the mighty Dnipro, as none of the boys has ever seen Ukraine’s principal river except in blurry photographs in which it looks to be made of cement instead of water. Yuri is exactly Katia’s age, and a natural choice for leader, not that there’d been any pretense of choice; as the whole thing is his idea, he takes ownership of the risks, and of the glory too.
If he could have his way, he’d dress up his band of brothers in baggy satin trousers and scalp locks. But the sharovary have been left behind in the city, and there’s hardly time for anyone to try to grow a khokhol, the long dangling lock of hair that identifies the warrior. They will have to make do with swimming trunks and crewcuts. For it’s the spirit, he tells the boys, the spirit, not the clothes, that counts. It goes without saying that secrecy is paramount—all the boys are sworn to keep the broad, flat rock’s new name to themselves: the Seech is not to become the laughingstock of mere girls and women, and as for the Brotherhood, it is sacred.
Teyko and Olek, the youngest boys, are shaky on their Ukrainian history, and so Yuri repeats, as well as he can, the lessons he has learned at Saturday School, or at least, the only part of the curriculum that holds any interest for him. Cossacks—the Kozaky—are free agents owing nothing to masters or mothers. They chose to throw off their chains as labourers for landlords (Rapacious Russians and Plundering Poles) who worked them like slaves. Striking out for the wild east, they lived as frontiersmen—sort of like the cowboys in Gunsmoke—in perfect equality, fraternity and justice. When Pavlo Vesiuk interrupts to ask why, if they’re all equal, there has to be a Hetman, Yuri pulls a face as if disgusted by the stupidity of the question. “I am your Hetman because I’m the oldest and because it’s all my idea, anyway. So if any of you wants to challenge me—”
He breaks off with his hand in the air, clutching an imaginary, spike-studded mace, symbol of the Hetman’s authority. His younger brother, Andriy, quickly intervenes: “Of course you’ll be Hetman—we can’t have a Seech without one,” and the other boys agree, all except Pavlo, who crosses his arms and sticks out his lips in that funny way he has of showing disdain more than displeasure.
No one remembers, afterwards, that it was Andriy who stood up for Yuri’s right to lead them. Andriychyk, or Little Andriy, they call him, though he’s just as tall as his older brother, and a good deal heavier, as well. Andriychyk or, as the boys prefer to call him, Pampushok or Pampukh, after the doughnuts filled with rose-petal jam or poppy seeds that their babas make. The cruelest nickname of all is provided by the girls, who’ve dubbed him Titty because of the way his chest and tummy wobble over his swimming trunks when he plays on the beach. Once Sonia had caught Katia taunting her cousin in this way, and sent her up to the cottage for a whole afternoon as punishment.
“The cossacks were warriors,” Yuri is insisting to the boys gathered round him; there is just enough room for them to sit at Yuri’s feet and for Yuri to perch on a small jut of rock that Pavlo refers to, sarcastically, as “the throne.”
“Meaning?” Olek inquires. It’s a habit he’s picked up from an older brother, who responds to almost any kind of speech, especially anything in the lecture department, with this one-word question.
“Meaning,” says Yuri patiently, and a little triumphantly too, “that we have to prove ourselves as warriors. We can’t just ride around on a log and talk big—we have to do something, something courageous and—”
“Warlike,” Pavlo finishes for him. “And just what are we going to declare war on, Yuri? The lake? Our mothers? Your cousins and their dumbbunny friends?”
There is a long silence, until finally, of all people, little Teyko pipes up: “We could kidnap Darka!”
“Girls aren’t allowed into the Seech,” Yuri says sternly. He stands up, arms folded and knees locked, pitching his voice as low as he can. “What we’ve got to do is something big and brave, something worthy of the Zaporozhtsi.”
He will think up something appropriately warlike, he promises them all. They will meet at the Seech at exactly the same time on Monday and he will inform them of his plan. For the moment, all must be secrecy, on pain of—
He hesitates. Pavlo smirks, and Andriy offers, “the Hetman’s Fury,” after which Yuri nods sternly, and springs onto the driftwood log, motioning for the rest of them to follow him. They must paddle back to shore and return to the cottages where their mothers are waiting dinner for them, before anyone suspects what they’ve been plotting.
Tinned peas and mashed potatoes are transferred from their pots onto six plates of three different patterns, spread out on the counter. Never enough room on a counter, especially in this hole of a kitchen, Sonia thinks. For the past five years, Max has been promising to tear it out and put in a new one for her, twice the size. He hasn’t ruled out a dishwasher, like the one at Nadia’s place: he says he’s waiting till they get all the bugs out of them and the price comes down to something he can afford. One for the cottage and one for the home, and then what will she have left to wish for?
When she was Bonnie’s age she’d fetched water from the pump they shared with five other families in the village. Her hands still carry the scars of blisters from the thin metal handles of the pails she carried; she tried always to hide them when she was modelling, or else to wear gloves. They were ruined, her hands, when she was still a child: she had worked since the time she was old enough to close her hands round a hoe or a needle or the teat of a cow. And yet, compared to the other children in the village, she had been spoiled. Especially compared to Peter, who always earned beatings for daydreaming when he should have been working, beatings with a switch across his small legs or skinny back. Peter, the man of the family, expected to stand in for his absent father.
Six plates: for Sonia, Laura, Katia, Bonnie, Alix—and Darka. Darka setting a bad example with her elbows on the table, chewing gum stuck to the edge of her plate—but until Max gets here Sonia needs Darka on side, can’t trust herself alone with the children. Baby Alix is staring out of those huge, black eyes of hers. Laura and Katia are fighting again—Laura’s face purple with rage; Katia’s eyes bright, hard as pebbles. She must have been teasing Laura, jabbing at her weak spots, and God knows … But Sonia stops herself from pitying her first-born; two years older than Katia, she should be able to stick up for herself instead of snapping and sulking. No wonder Katia’s always kicking her under the table, pinching her ribs: Laura, the perfect target. Sonia knows, she knows everything they get up to, but she’s not God, it’s not for her to stop them killing each other inch by inch.
The peas have boiled dry: she’d left them just for a minute to change into a skirt and blouse, for Max’s return, but the peas are branded, each one of them, with a small black scar. They are the only green vegetable she has left; she’ll put mint sauce on them, the children won’t notice the burnt taste. She bites her lips to distract herself from the pain zigging across her scalp, homing in behind her left eye. First Zirka this morning, twisting all those knives she keeps at the ready, and then Sasha in the afternoon, Sasha and her cigarettes, Sasha and the plots she’s concocted from all those books she reads and passes round. Another spasm stabs through Sonia’s body, up from her heel, along the length of her leg, across her breast to the top of her head. A spasm of irritation so pure, so lethal, she sees the tunnel scorched inside her, she can feel her body smoking.
“For God’s sake, Laura, stop playing with your food and eat up. And stop smirking, Katia, it makes you look like a little jar of poison.”
Katia mashes her peas with the back of her fork, lifts them to her mouth and makes a great show of swallowing them. Laura sits staring at her plate, her spine rigid.
“I said, eat your peas, Laura.”
“They’re burned.”
“They’re not burned. If Katia can eat them, so can you. We don’t waste food in this family, you know that. If you’d even once had to go hungry, you wouldn’t put on this—this ridiculous performance.” It’s not her own voice speaking, it’s something from a radio show, Lux Theatre, from which she learned English at Sasha’s house when she was a twelve-year-old. This has nothing to do with Laura, or the peas on her plate, but by this point Sonia can’t stop herself. She stands up from the table, her hands on her hips, the jut of her elbows pinning them all. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to, all of you, sneaking money from the change drawer, buying candy at the store. No wonder you can’t eat your dinner. Why do I waste my time cooking for you? Go on, be stubborn, you can sit there all night for all I care. But just you wait till your father comes home!”
“With Chucha Marta,” Katia says, almost innocently.
Laura hasn’t even shifted in her chair, her hands on either side of her plate, wrists cocked at the table’s edge. When she was younger, she would hollow a door into her scoop of mashed potatoes, push her peas inside and seal them up with a spoonful of potato she’d left at the side of her plate. No one would notice but Katia, and Katia had been different then; she’d looked up to her.
Sonia waits for a moment, as if trying to hold on to her patience, to achieve consistency between words and actions. She knows what she should do: she should gather up the younger children and take them off to Venus Variety for ice cream—she should leave Laura sulking at the table over a stupid little pile of peas. She should laugh at her, laugh at herself. But even as she waits, Sonia knows that she will not, cannot do what she should. Her voice goes hard, precise; she hammers out each word: “I’ve had enough of your sulking, Laura. Finish your supper this instant.”
Laura doesn’t miss a beat. “I’ll be sick if I have to eat those peas. If you make me eat them, I’ll throw up.”
“You’ll sit at this table—you will all, every last one of you, sit at this table till Laura’s plate is clean.”
Mother and daughter haven’t taken their eyes off each other as they’ve spoken these words. The room is silent; even Darka stops tapping her fork against the oilcloth. Laura stares at her mother, at the pale blue lakes of her eyes. If Baba Laryssa were here this wouldn’t be happening; Baba would stretch out her hand and say, “Leave her be, leave her be, donyu.” But Baba’s dead, and there’s no one to help her. Bonnie’s too young, and Darka doesn’t care. Besides, Sonia doesn’t give a damn what Darka thinks, a good goddam. Slowly, grimly, Laura lifts a forkful of peas to her mouth and pushes them in.
“Swallow!”
She swallows. And then another forkful, and another.
“What an actress,” Sonia exclaims, brushing imaginary crumbs off her skirt. “Get the Jell-O, Darka, it’s on the counter.”
But before the glass bowl of ruby-coloured Jell-O lands on the table, Laura lurches forward, Katia and Baby Alix staring at her throat as though it were a boa constrictor working in reverse, greyish-green paste spilling from her mouth onto her clean, clean plate.
Katia and Tania meet Yuri by the abandoned car, its rusted hood pushed up by the weeds thrusting through it. No one knows whose car it is, or how it got here, in the middle of the woods. Yuri says it was abandoned by a criminal, and when Tania asks what kind of criminal he says, off the top of his head, a baby killer, a kidnapper. Katia rolls her eyes, but Tania shivers, which irritates Katia. All of a sudden she suspects her friend of playing up to her cousin, of going all girly.
“So what are we going to do?” Yuri asks, standing as straight as he can—that way he’s a quarter of an inch taller than Katia, and level with Tania.
“Spy,” Katia snaps.
“Where?”
“The Durkowskis,” Yuri jumps in.
Pan Durkowski works as a janitor at the cathedral downtown and at the hall next door; his wife helps him clean the buildings and works part time at the Arka store on Queen West, selling stamps and weighing parcels to be shipped to Ukraine. They spend part of every summer at Kalyna Beach: Mr. Senchenko gives them the use of a cottage, more like a shack, off Tunnel Road. He drives them up to the lake for three weeks and then takes them back to their apartment in the basement of the cathedral hall. People say that Pan Durkowski was an architect in Ukraine before the war, but that he hasn’t got the right qualifications for Canada, qualifications meaning things like diplomas, contacts, language. Besides, he’s old; it would take him too long to retrain.
“Not the Durkowskis,” Tania complains. “They don’t have any secrets—we’d be wasting our time.”
“No, no,” Yuri says, putting his arms around the girls, drawing them close, as if into a football huddle. Pan Durkowski, Yuri whispers, fought for the Germans during the war; he was on Hitler’s side.
Katia’s about to pull herself away, to say, in her most scathing tone, That’s crazy, Yuri—you don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s about to start singing a playground song she learned when she was Bonnie’s age: Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk, when once again, she notices something funny about her friend. Usually Tania never believes a word Yuri says, but this time, for some reason, she is leaning into Yuri, widening her eyes, practically saying oooooh.
Katia reaches forward and snaps the elastic on the waistband of Yuri’s trousers. Before he can slap her hand, she runs off, calling back: “I’m going off to spy; you two can stay behind and play kissy-face.”
Yuri sprints after her; Tania waits for a moment, uncertain whether to punish Katia by turning round and going home. Doesn’t Katia understand that she’s making fun of Yuri—what’s her mother’s word for it?—playing up to him, so that she can knock him down all the harder? It’s not like Katia to be so dumb. And then Tania has a flash of understanding, or suspicion, or both; she scrambles through the lush weeds back to the road, catching up with Katia and her cousin, keeping their silence and watching them both on the sly.
The children tiptoe along the side of the Durkowskis’ cabin, where the grass is sparse and pine needles fall into rusty pools. Pan Durkowski spends most of his summer holiday mowing what’s left of the lawn, building paths lined with pebbles brought up from the beach, doing calisthenics. He tried to teach them to the boys, but they ended up laughing and running away, so he performs his exercises alone, wearing a white undershirt tucked into his bathing trunks, and a handkerchief knotted over his head. They expect to see him doing exercises in the kitchen now, or else, Yuri hopes, polishing his Luger and looking over his military badges—swastikas, lightning stripes of the SS, all the paraphernalia Yuri has seen in the war movies he watches late at night, when his parents are asleep and he’s sneaked down to the family room, where they keep the TV.
A little square of light glows from the cabin, soft, buttery light from a high window. Yuri gives Katia a leg up, and she stares through the screen, memorizing all the details that she can. It’s the kitchen, not the bedroom: there’s a ten-pound sack of potatoes on the counter beside a large aluminum pot. In the middle of the table jewelweed and chicory flowers are crammed into a jam jar—the kind of ditch flower that kids Bonnie’s age pick for their mothers. The Durkowskis sit with heads bowed at a scarred, enamel-topped table, peeling potatoes and grating a huge block of Velveeta cheese. They are preparing to make varenyky, that dish for which there’s no English equivalent, not dumpling, not pasty, not boiled dough-ball either. Pan Durkowski is in his undershirt and his grey city trousers; his wife is wearing only her slip and a scarf over her head—pale blue chiffon, pincurls showing underneath like metal snails. The white of the slip cuts into her chest, and pink flesh sags over the nylon, like curtains too big for their window. Katia’s about to whisper something down to Tania about Pani Durkowska’s breasts, but changes her mind.
“Let’s go,” Tania says to Yuri. “Nothing’s happening here.” She’s angry at Katia, and she’s nervous too. For after the ladies left the veranda that afternoon, after Sonia had gone into and then come out of the log cabin for her heart-to-heart with Sasha, nothing had happened. Tania had expected her mother to lecture her—though Sasha is most often easygoing to a fault, there have been times when she has been known to act no differently than any other of the Mean Mothers. She might have forbidden Tania to go to the store any more, or kept her from seeing Katia—but she hadn’t said or done anything like that at all. Whatever she and Mrs. Martyn were talking about together must be bad enough that they’re waiting for the fathers to deal with it. Right now, the mothers think their daughters are reading in their rooms: Little Women and Five Little Peppers. They think the girls are reading in their rooms in the pyjamas they slipped over their shorts before brushing their teeth and kissing their mothers good night. “Let’s go,” Tania urges.
But Katia’s still watching through the bowed-out screen of the kitchen window, as if waiting for something to happen—something she can make happen just by watching. What, she doesn’t know. Maybe Pani Durkowska will grab the paring knife from her husband and stab him through the heart the way Katia saw once in a horror film. Or Pan Durkowski just might pull out that Luger Yuri’s always going on about; might put it to his head and squeeze the trigger. It’s not that Katia wants violence: it’s just that the plots available to her are extremely limited, even more so with people as old as these, people who don’t belong to anyone, and who spend their time telling other people what to do with their children.
But now something does happen, something more startling than anything Katia can invent. Pani Durkowska puts down the potato peeler and moves her hands not to the paring knife, but to the jam jar of flowers. She pulls out a stalk of chicory and holds it against her face, just by her ear. And for a moment, just one fraction of a moment, Katia sees what Pani Durkowska must have looked like when she was young: when she was Darka’s age. The old man puts down his grater, reaches for his wife’s hand, the one holding the flower, and holds it against his cheek. What startles Katia is the gentleness of the gesture, and the way these two worn-down people are joined by something so tender and yet so strong that she is suddenly ashamed. Ashamed not of them, but of herself; to be witnessing what, she later realizes, is a gesture of love.
“What’s going on?” Yuri hisses. His back aches: Katia is having all the fun while he does all the work. It’s always the way. Yet for some reason he can’t shrug it off as he usually does, but takes it to heart. Katia lording it over him, digging her sandalled feet into him as if he were a horse or a camel.
“Nothing,” Katia answers, in the clear, bright voice she uses when she’s fibbing. “They’re not doing anything—just peeling potatoes.”
Abruptly, Yuri leans forward, so that Katia tumbles from his shoulders, giving a shriek as she falls. The girls start running as fast as they can towards the road, but Yuri stops to collect a fistful of gravel from one of the paths Pan Durkowski has built. He sprays the kitchen screen. He’s starting to make a run for it when a hand seizes the back of his collar, the same hand that had been held up to an old woman’s cheek, moments before.
“Trrrr-ubble makers,” Pan Durkowski cries out in English, the sound of the words bent out of shape by his accent. “Khoodlooms.”
By now the girls have disappeared: Yuri is alone. But as he’s hauled into the Durkowskis’ cottage, he hears the sound of chanting:
Old man Nicky
had a twelve-foot dicky.
He showed it to the lady next door.
She thought it was a snake
so she hit it with a rake
and now it’s only two foot four.
The girls should be laughing, they should be holding their stomachs and rolling in the grass, but instead they stand there, listening to the echo of Tania’s song. For Katia hasn’t joined in. Though they’ve sworn a pact to share equally in the thrill of and the punishment for all disobedience, for the first time ever, Katia’s refused to join in. It can’t be explained, Tania thinks, by Yuri getting caught by Pan Durkowski: Yuri asked for it, and besides, he could have run away if he’d really wanted to. He could have shaken free as easily as if it were Baby Alix who’d snatched hold of his collar. Tania chews on her lip, and rubs the toe of her running shoe into the loose, pale dirt beside the road.
As for Katia, there’s a taste in her mouth of something that shouldn’t be there, like grass or earth. When she does speak, it’s an excuse, not an explanation: she has to get home before her father arrives, her mother’s in such a bitchy mood that she’ll go berserk if she finds that Katia’s sneaked out. Tania nods, and the two walk on in silence.
When they reach the Martyns’ driveway, Tania spits into her hand, waiting for Katia to follow suit; the girls join hands as if nothing’s gone wrong or awry, then pull away from each other. Tania whispers something about spying on Darka, just the two of them, without any boy along to spoil things. Katia nods, and her friend runs off down the road.
She stays put, rocking on her heels, her eyes fixed on her father’s car, stranded in the gravel. The engine’s still warm when she finally steps forward and puts out her hands to it. Warm as her father’s face when he bends down to kiss her; as his chest when he holds her in a bear hug. Through the open window, Katia can see her father sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands; her mother stands beside him, her arms loose but her shoulders stiff as fire irons. Somewhere in the kitchen Chucha Marta is rummaging among the pots and pans, putting them away and muttering to herself in the voice that always makes Katia think of someone crushing shiny, crackly beetle shells under a shoe.
She waits for a moment, though she knows she could easily be found out; her mother might turn, her father look up and see her. It’s Chucha Marta who gives her away: she steps out the kitchen door onto the little porch, starts shouting at Katia for being out of doors when she’s supposed to be in bed, fast asleep, keeping out of trouble.
But still, Katia stands there, waiting. As if she could will them to turn to each other, not even to kiss, just to turn to each other gently.
Gently.
The door swings shut behind him, and the cottage disappears, the cottage and everyone inside it: his bitter wife, his crazy, awful sister, the three sleeping children he doesn’t want to wake and the one who’s been caught sneaking out of her room at night, the one he will be expected to punish in the morning. If he were to turn and look back, he knows he’d see his wife at the picture window, her face a moon swallowed up by clouds. And he is the man in the moon, the man of the house, paterfamilias, but with no more power, really, than a moonbeam. Spank Katia? He didn’t drive all this way to beat his children, Sonia should know that by now. But what Sonia knows—and doesn’t, won’t allow herself to know …
Max shoves his hands in his pockets and walks down the zigzag path to the beach, the yellow square of light on his back, the impress of his wife’s face getting smaller, weaker with every step. No moon at all, tonight, but not because of clouds—stars salt the blackness overhead, as many stars, he thinks, as there are hairs on his body: a carpet, a pelt like an animal’s. He tightens his lips, thinking of the dog Sonia won’t let Laura have, no matter how hard, how relentlessly she begs. He should just go out and buy Laura the dog, any dog, and have done with it. It would do her good, his poor, clumsy Laura, who should have been a boy; she isn’t quick-witted like Katia, or pretty and pleasing, like Bonnie, but the awkward, stubborn kind who’ll always know too much for her own good.
Down at the shore it’s so quiet he can hear each wave as it licks, then kicks back against the sand. The dark—it’s the thing he loves most about this place: you can actually see the dark. In the city there are always too many lights, or the hum from power-lines overhead; everyone, everything’s on the move, rushing and racketing about, but here—. He takes a trim silver case from his shirt pocket and pulls out a cigar; holding it under his nose like a pretend moustache, he breathes the scent in so deeply he might be calling up the coconuts and sugar cane from the island where the tobacco grows. For some reason Marta had been going on and on in the car about last year’s Cuban missile crisis. How the Americans had lost their nerve; how they should have stood up to the Russians and that ex-Ukrainian party boss who is no more Ukrainian than the shoe he thumped on the table at the U.N. In spite of himself, Max had let her get to him; he’d actually turned round for a second, asking her whether she’d have preferred Khrushchev—or Kennedy—to have pushed the button. “Button—ha!” she’d exclaimed, using the Ukrainian word, gudzyk, making it sound like something out of a children’s game. And then, to top it off, she’d screeched, “Keep your eyes on the road, do you want to kill us both?”
Max allows himself the first rich puff of his cigar; expels a fragrant plume of smoke into the air, a plume that gathers, then wavers, slowly pushing itself apart. It’s the only sign of anything that’s stirring here, beside the barely beating waves and the stars overhead, the stars that move so slowly they might as well be nails hammered into a board. The same stars the president in Washington could be staring at this very moment, the rich-boy president with his rugged good looks and his cool millions, his beautiful wife and perfect children: a girl, a boy. A man no older, and perhaps no smarter, all in all, than Max Metelsky, but with his finger on the life-or-death of the very planet.
He’s glad, suddenly, that his children are in bed, safe and sleeping peacefully. If the bomb were to hit (he always thinks of it as one single, silver missile, some gigantic bullet) they would never know. But this is morbid, outrageous—this kind of thinking is worthy of Marta. He draws intently on his cigar. Three hours of Marta in the car, and then Sonia, shouting loud and clear as always with that stiff silence of hers, and what the hell did he do wrong, just what was she punishing him for this time? For not leaving Marta to asphyxiate herself—the word soothes and supports him, a word Sonia wouldn’t know, never mind use—asphyxiate herself in that oven of a house they should have got rid of long ago?
But then where would Marta have gone; would Sonia prefer Marta to be living with them—would she prefer to have Marta to put up with, instead of a dog? It’s not as though Sonia didn’t have family of her own to hang around his neck. Of course it was a terrible shame, her mother dying so suddenly, but she should be able to cope with that by now—it’s been four months already. Look at Peter, he isn’t exactly wailing and beating his breast. This show she puts on—not that she’s pretending to grieve, but it’s the performance that gets him: crying all the time, or else silent; wearing sunglasses to hide her wept-out eyes. It’s bad for the children to see their mother affected this way. His mother had never cried once, he had never seen her weep, and God knows, the life she’d had—or Marta, for that matter. She had a tongue all right, but he’d rather that than Sonia’s dagger-silence and red-jelly eyes.
“Hail Caesar, back from the wars!”
Stealing up on him, as usual: how is it he never hears Peter coming? He’s wearing shorts and a stained, rumpled shirt and carrying a pair of sneakers in his hands.
“So. Peter.”
“Come on, Max, you can do better. Why not ‘Hail, fellow, well met’ or morituri te salutant? And come to think of it, a cigar would go down a treat right now.”
They say you can choose your friends but not your family, but what is Peter to Max? Neither one nor the other. His wife’s brother, no-account, devil-may-care—what was it in the commercial?—debonair, that was the word for Peter. Rogue, idler, jack of all trades, master mimic—he’d been taking off Rex Harrison just now, and to the life. In spite of himself, Max holds out the cigar case as if he had a hundred more Havanas back at the cottage. Sonia hates the smell of them, they give her headaches, she is famous for her headaches; but look at Peter, his life shot all to hell, yet smiling like he hasn’t got a care in the world. Peter, who never gives a thought to the power-monger-men in Moscow, Cuba, Washington.
They sit side by side on a boulder by the shore, as if they were the closest, the easiest of friends: two men gliding into middle age, whose hair is starting to thin. Peter’s is carelessly tinged with grey, as if he’d been painting a ceiling and had forgotten, as usual, to put on a protective cap. But Peter is lean, still has an athlete’s body. He played what at university? Soccer, baseball, various amatory sports—he got in on a serviceman’s scholarship, but let his grades drop like a pair of pants round his ankles. Had Peter ever had so much as a scrap of ambition—was there anything he’d ever meant to become before good looks, and easy charm, and native laziness got in the way? A teacher, a doctor, a plumber, for God’s sake? No, nothing so exalted, so practical, but an actor—an actor!
Max throws his cigar as far as he can towards the lake, waiting for the hiss of fire on water. He’s remembering the ass Peter made of himself acting up last weekend, at the Plotskys’ party. Remembering, too, some shred of gossip—and Max is, most often, immune to gossip, so he can’t be sure he isn’t making it up—about Peter having fallen for someone in his youth, fallen hopelessly, as you’d expect a man like Peter to do: no sense of proportion or judgment. A miracle, that he’d ended up with Zirka Senchenko, and through Zirka, her millionaire brother. Better luck than he deserved, although God knows that woman would drive you to worse than drink. He coughs to cover his thoughts—as if Peter had that trick in his bag, mind reading, of all things.
“Christ, the traffic’s awful—I swear it gets worse each time I come up—and I thought leaving after supper there’d be no one on the roads.”
“It was okay when I drove up,” Peter says, flicking ash into the remains of a fortress the kids have been building, a moat lined with small, white pebbles. “But I started out at two o’clock. I decided to take the afternoon off, things are always slow on a Friday.”
“Funny, it’s the busiest time of the week for me.” Max can’t keep a flick of disapproval from his voice, and Peter can’t help catching it, wearing it like a rose in his buttonhole.
“Man’s got to live a little before that big old spitfire pilot in the sky trains his guns on him. Haven’t you ever cut a workday short, Max?”
“No.”
“Not even when you were courting my sweet sister?”
“If I were the type to play hooky from the office, there’s no way your sweet sister would have let me look at her, never mind court her.” Max hasn’t meant to say this much, he’d meant to ignore the question, or change the subject. Peter’s capable of taking his answer as a sign that he wants to talk, not about the things men usually talk about, the way they talk—stock market, sports, politics—but things better left private, things you don’t even want to think about, never mind confess to someone like Peter Metelsky.
“Things aren’t going so well between the two of you these days, Max?”
“I don’t discuss my private affairs. Besides, you’re one to talk.”
“I thought as much. Sonia’s funny like that, always has been. Goes off the deep end. About our mother, I mean, all this grieving—”
“Sonia’s a wonderful woman.”
“Of course she is, Max, of course she is. So are they all—wonderful women.”
He’s waiting for Max to ask him something about Zirka, about the desert of their marriage. Max knows that if he gives even the slightest sign—a shrug, a grunt—Peter will tell him everything. As if Max wanted to hear, as if he doesn’t have enough on his hands with Sonia, Marta, Laura—a houseful of women at war. Peter at least has sons. If only, Max thinks, the next one could be a boy, everything would be all right again. There is still time for a boy. It wouldn’t weigh on her so much, then, her mother’s death, and she’d stop worrying so much about Alix, thinking it’s her fault the child won’t speak, is so cold, so closed off to them all. Saying she hadn’t wanted her, and the child knows it, is punishing her. Crazy talk: the child is going to be fine, she’s a late bloomer, that’s all; it’s only if they keep worrying, carrying on about her that there’ll be a problem. Hasn’t the doctor said so? Always having to hug some guilt to her chest, is Sonia: some thorn or spike of glass. He has never known a woman with so small a gift for happiness.
And yet she was beautiful, is still so beautiful he can be stunned, winded, just by looking at her. Seeing her when she thought she was alone, or the rare times when she couldn’t give a damn how she looked, how decently she was dressed. Like on the afternoon she stormed into his office, crying out—her father had been rushed to hospital, he had to come with her now, right now, this very moment. He’d almost forgotten about the client sitting there, had almost gone to her and taken her in his arms to comfort her, tell her all would be well, he was with her, he’d make sure that nothing bad would happen. But by the time he made his excuses to his client and spoke to his secretary to cancel the remaining appointments, Sonia had already left. And she refused to greet him when he showed up at the hospital, ten minutes after she’d arrived. Fifteen minutes at the most, he’d swear to it.
“Better be getting back,” Peter says, throwing his cigar butt, like Max’s, into the water. It falls instead onto the soaked sand at the very rim of the lake. Peter shrugs, jams his hands in his pockets. But he makes no move to rise. “They’ll be wondering where we are,” he says at last. “They’ll be thinking us drowned at the very least. We should be so lucky.”
Max isn’t taking any bait. Though he knows what Peter is saying—knows what he, Max, would like to be able to ask, if not of Peter then of someone who’d value the question, even if he had no answer. Not a priest, not a teacher or doctor, not even the huge blue eye painted on the cathedral dome, but just someone he doesn’t know and will never meet again. Some perfect stranger who happens to walk by and see him, sitting here by the water:
Is this what my life, and hers, have come to—just this, and no more? If those men in high places, with their oh-so-powerful fingers, decide to push that button, will it all have been for nothing. And my daughters asleep in their beds—if they’re spared to grow up—will there be nothing more for them than this? A man like Peter, a man like me? A man whose life will add up, at the end of each week, to five days slogging at the office, two days at the cottage fixing a few of the hundred things that have gone wrong or need replacing, six hours’ driving here and back, when the traffic is bad?
Peter stretches out his arms and yawns so lazily, so voluptuously that it has to be an act. “Two whole days I’ve got free, forty-eight fine and blessed hours, and I’m not going to spend even one of them fixing a single thing, no matter how many fits Zirka throws.”
“Lucky you. Enjoy yourself.”
“You taking any time off this summer?”
“I have to make up for the time I took off when your mother died.”
It sounds like a reproach. It is. Sonia collapsed, and Peter was no goddam help—you’d think a brother would be able to support a sister, talk to her, make her see sense the way a husband couldn’t. Useless, Peter: utterly useless.
“Good night, then, Max.” Peter is starting to walk away, not in the direction of his cottage but farther up the shore.
“Good night. And Peter—”
Max waits for a moment, until he assures himself that Peter has stopped walking, has turned to face him.
“Don’t act the fool in front of everyone again. Once a summer’s more than enough.”
If Peter’s angered by Max’s warning, he doesn’t show it. “‘Good night, sweet Prince,’” he calls out. “‘Flights of angels,’ and all that.” He resumes his stroll down the beach, in the direction of the highest bluff, the one the kids have named Gibraltar.
Max, climbing heavily up the steps to the cottage, doesn’t answer. The porch light’s out, the window looks like a socket without an eye. He knows she’ll be asleep, or pretending.
He’s lying with his back to her, snoring, the sheets and covers rolled around him, turning him into a thick white spool of thread. For a while Sonia stays in bed beside him, knowing she won’t sleep but that it’s far too complicated to get up, and that while he sleeps so soundly, she is safe. Once again she goes through the list of things that have to be done in the next two days: get Max to buy the lumber to fix the porch steps; stand over him to make sure he actually does the carpentry; handle Marta’s interference, her snorts of criticism. Then, when he’s finished the steps, when he’s in a thoroughly bad mood, about to head back to the city along with all the thousands of other husbands in their lonely cars, hand him the letter to give to Olya, whom he has never really cared for, and who lives far enough away from them for it to be an imposition. Hand Olya the letter and reassurances about Darka, lies about what a willing help Darka’s been.
And last of all, Peter. Talk to Peter, though how can she begin to say anything to him about so painful a subject? If Sasha thinks he’ll listen to her because he’s her brother—but what business is it of Sasha’s, anyway? Why doesn’t she talk to Nadia instead; butter wouldn’t melt in that one’s mouth: I’d rather read Shakespeare. Peter’s never taken advice, that’s why he’s always in one kind of a mess or another. She told him all those years ago it would be a mistake, marrying Zirka: he had only smiled at her in that careless way he had, smiled and never really trusted her again. Thinking of Peter makes Sonia’s legs and arms cramp up; her heart performs its somersaults the way it always does when she forces herself to be still, to lie back and relax. Surely it must be getting on to morning?
At last she rises silently, cautiously, without letting the bedsprings creak even once, groping her way to the kitchen for a drink of water. The stove clock with its cracked face tells her it’s only two. Not a sound from the room where Marta’s sleeping—Darka’s room. Darka’s been packed off to the sleep-house, and Sonia doesn’t like the arrangement at all, it makes her nervous not to have the girl under her roof. Though what good would that do—how could you keep the worst from happening, when what was supposed to have been the best has turned out as it has?
Carefully, as gently as if she were touching the face of one of her children, Sonia opens the side door and looks out across the lawn to the sleep-house. Still as the grave, she thinks, pulling the lapels of her pyjamas closer. She doesn’t want to think about graves, she can’t stop herself hearing her mother, in her hospital bed, in pain so fierce you’d think it was skinning her, saying, “I would grab at a straw floating in the river to keep on living.”
The kitchen clock says 2:14, as if to spite her: it seems to her hours since she left her husband’s bed, opening the door onto a skyful of stars. Sonia makes her way once more to the children’s rooms, going in to them, covering them if the blankets have been tossed to the floor, sometimes bending to stroke their hair. By Laura’s bed she stops for the longest time, afraid to touch her—she’s no longer a child, she has lost that ferociousness, that fever-sleep the little ones are still consumed by. And here, sleeping spoons beside her, Sonia’s golden one, her sweet, sunny Bonnie, whom she always has to keep herself from kissing, from throwing her arms around and holding, lest the others see that she’s Sonia’s favourite, the only one she loves without reserve.
Across the hall, Katia lies with her arms flung back, as if she is dancing wildly in her dreams. But when Sonia bends over the baby, the one who will only let herself be kissed when she is sleeping, she gives a little cry that makes Katia stir in her sleep; stir but not wake. Alix’s round, black eyes are wide open, staring up at her mother like pools into which the whole night has fallen. “Go to sleep,” Sonia whispers, using the old language, the one in which her mother sang lullabies to her in the Old Place. But Alix keeps staring up at her, her eyes accusing, as always. Until it seems to Sonia that the only way she can close them is by taking the baby into her arms, pressing her head against her breast, and carrying her outside.
Out onto the veranda, and the stairs that so badly need fixing. So warm, still, though it’s the middle of the night, a dark fragrant with pine and cedar, not the chocolate smell of summer nights at her mother’s house downtown. Not her mother’s house any more: it was sold weeks after her death. They’d had to scramble to clear it out, lugging boxes and boxes of what Max called junk to the basement of their house in the suburbs. Lamps and blankets and cooking pots; an envelope of yellowed paper on which, in pale purple ink, were marked the fields that had never been sold, that now lay under the jaws of some giant tractor on a collective farm. Moyee polya—my fields: words like a tongue dipped in chocolate, as soft as the most expensive velvet. Or the angora muff Mr. Streatfield had once given her as a present, and that she hadn’t dared to show her mother, keeping it always in her drawer, taking it out sometimes to hold its impossible softness to her face.
Settling herself on the top step, holding Alix against her, feeling the child’s open eyes against her breast, Sonia tilts her head to look up at stars scratched upon the sky, endless and unreachable. She remembers waking up from the anaesthetic after Alix was born, waking in an isolation room, a belt of stinging blisters below her breasts, around her back, cinching her tight, so tight the skin felt rubbed entirely away. Shingles, it was called; it had been too painful for Sonia to nurse the baby, and so her mother had looked after the child, feeding her from a bottle every few hours. If it hadn’t been for Baba Laryssa, Alix would never have thrived, and now her baba is lying in a place dark as a night without moon or stars, without the smell or feel or even the memory of milk, or skin, or angora.
Sonia gathers Alix to her, the child’s body no longer stiff in her arms, no longer holding out against her but soft, collapsed into sleep. So that the mother can drop her mouth to her baby’s head and kiss the thick, dark hair, not demanding anything back, just feeling the soft warmth of the small body next to her own. “She’s dead, baby, and I will die, and you will die too, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.” The boat out from Gdynia, the Marshal Pilsudski, with the brass band and the sailors more like machines than men in their uniforms so spanking new, trouser creases you could cut yourself on. Holding Peter’s hand, pushing through a forest of trousered legs and thick wool skirts, lisle stockings. Till they got to the railings and held on for dear life, breathing in the salt sting of the sea so far below. No river that could drown her, filling her nose and mouth with dark; no river but a blue-black road that would take her away, forever. From the village where she couldn’t face anyone, could hardly breathe any more; from the best part of her life, the child she’d once been in that village: at home, at one, complete.
The stars are sailing wherever it is they are meant to go, or not meant, it is all the same, thinks the woman sitting on the rotting steps of a summer cottage, holding a sleeping child against her breast. Throwing her head back and staring up at that starry, inky double of the sea, that road that she will never travel now, no matter how urgent, how huge her longing. The child’s mouth lies open at her breast as if she were about to nurse, drinking the milk her mother no longer has, and never wants to have again. Sonia recites, very softly, the words of the rhyme her children have taught her, words that have no meaning for her, or a meaning that is faint, unreadable, like the print on a dress that has been washed too many times:
Ladybug, ladybug,
fly away home.
Your house is on fire,
your children are gone.
All save the little one,
whose name is Ann,
And she’s hiding under
the frying pan.