Sunday afternoon, when it’s still too early to think of tonight’s traffic and tomorrow’s appointments, Max goes down to the beach. He’s finished whatever jobs could be compassed in a forty-eight-hour stay: putting a patch on the leaky roof, fixing the latch on the kitchen door. The steps on the front porch will have to wait till next summer. These two hot, empty hours in the afternoon are his gift to himself: he’s going to bake in the sun for a while, and then play with the children. Sonia’s up at the cottage with Marta, who refuses to come down to the beach: she will get sunstroke, the arthritis in her legs is so bad she can barely move, she needs to take her medicine at three. It has already begun, the two-step Marta and Sonia will perform for the next six days of Marta’s stay: Marta piling up objections, Sonia attempting to knock them down: you will not get sunstroke, thanks to the beach umbrella bought at the hardware in Midland, just for your visit; the hot sand will be good for your arthritic legs, much better than a heat lamp; you can take your medicine with some lemonade I’ll have ready in the cooler I’ll carry down to the beach. But as in any dance, only one person can lead: already, Sonia has bowed to her partner, spending the best part of the day keeping her company in the stifling cottage, while the rest of them enjoy the breeze rustling the grasses in the dunes, or send beach balls spinning across the sand.
“Tatu,” Katia yells, rushing up to where Max lies spread-eagled on his blanket. “Tatu,” she cries, “please let us bury you!”
At first he pretends not to hear, but then, as the other children dance around him, even Laura, who’s been in one of her moods all weekend, he flaps his hands on the beach blanket, a signal for the kids to jump on him and tickle him till he begs for mercy. Until he finally rolls over and off the blanket, landing on his back on a platter of pale, dry sand.
It takes them a good twenty minutes. At first the sand is hot; it stings as it sprays across his face, over the lips and eyelids he’s trying to shut tight. Of course you’re not supposed to bury anyone’s face, that’s against the rules, but sand meant for your shoulders always ends up in your eyebrows and salting your moustache. Soon, however, the children reach the excavating stage, when the sand they heap over their father’s legs and chest and arms turns heavy, damp, like cold brown sugar. He imagines his body rising up like some mountain range—the Rockies or the Himalayas. He thinks of his head islanded in all this sand, taking in the sounds of his children, their frantic pleasure, the gravity of Laura’s directives: “Not like that, Katia, you’ll cause a cave-in at his elbows,” and Katia’s blithe disregard: “Hey, his kneecaps keep showing through, they look like volcanoes!” A scrabbling pressure on his chest—”Somebody get the baby, she’s ruining everything!”—and then a crescendo of yells as Darka carries off Baby Alix.
At last, when the children have stomped the sand down with their feet and then heaped on another few pails for good measure, comes the chief delight. Their father, shaking his head and yawning as if roused from a hundred-year sleep, flexes first one arm, and then the other, tries and fails to shake a leg free, wriggles his toes and sets off the first of the avalanches. Until, with the roar of a lion, he heaves his whole body up in one great rush, throwing fans of sand into the air as he plunges into the lake, the children screaming as they run in after him.
Once they’ve splashed him clean, and he’s dived down to grab their ankles, once they’ve all lined up to wriggle through his outstretched legs, he tells them it’s Tato’s time now, which means he swims out, with his powerful, steady crawl stroke, far away from the group of small, tanned bodies. Bonnie, standing on a rock so the water reaches only to her waist, watches him with her fingers in her mouth, sucking anxiously each time his head disappears, praying, Pleasepleaseplease let him come up again. But at last, after he’s swum sixty, seventy, eighty strokes so that his handsome head is only a dark dot, he turns, waves—and comes back to them. How they love it when he stands up on the first sandbar, ten feet tall, the water streaming down his arms and chest, and how they love the way he cleans the water from his eyes with the flat of his hands, then combs his thick brown hair straight back with his fingers. He is the best-looking father at the whole beach, the best swimmer, and the only grown-up, besides Uncle Peter, they will ever include in their play.
Now it’s leapfrog on the sand, Max pretending to trip and making spectacular, somersaulting falls. “Horsing around” is what Sonia calls it, standing at the lookout post on the edge of the lawn while Marta’s still in the washroom. Horsing around. Her father had never played with her or her brother like that—and yet he’d been a good man, decent and hard-working even after his accident, managing the pain with sips of what he called “medicine,” from a shot glass. But never to excess—he was always dignified, her father. Unlike Peter. Unlike Max, making a fool of himself now in front of everyone. She bites at her lip, pushes her hair out of her eyes. He makes a fool of himself and they love him for it—when they are grown and think back to their summers at the beach they will remember playing leapfrog with their father, burying him in sand, and never spare a thought for the days and days she’s spent washing and cooking and cleaning, rubbing calamine lotion on sunburns, cutting up endless watermelons, making hundreds of jugs of lemonade.
“Soniu! Shcho tam?” Marta’s voice, flapping from the porch off the kitchen.
“Nothing,” Sonia shouts back, knowing how it annoys Marta when they speak to her in English. What would happen, she asks herself, if, instead of turning back to the cottage, where Marta will be sitting with a heap of darning (she has found a plastic bag of the children’s socks with great holes rubbed through the heels, socks Sonia was going to use for cleaning rags)—if, instead of turning back, she were to run down to the beach and join them, laugh and tumble with them on the sand? Go if you want to. She hears a voice, her mother’s voice, like a flower tucked behind her ear. But something huge and smothering settles on her shoulders, pushing her back to where her sister-in-law is waiting for her, holding the door open, letting in the mosquitos they’ll be swatting all through the slow August night.
It’s Bonnie he catches in his arms, swinging her high, high in the air and down to his shoulders, wading with her into the water. It’s the last treat of the afternoon, one of them getting to ride on their father’s back to the rock they’ve christened Australia; to lie down in the sun beside him, having him all to herself for a whole half-hour.
His daughters are all dear to him—Laura because she’s his first-born, the details of her infancy and childhood etched on his memory, so that with each subsequent baby he’s relived Laura’s first tooth or word or step. Katia because of her flair for mischief, the way she dances her way through life without caring what anyone will think or say, knowing she can outwit them all. And Alix because she’s still a baby, and he has no idea yet of what she will become. But Bonnie is the gentlest, and with her red-gold hair, her brown, gold-speckled eyes, the most beautiful by far. No one in his family or Sonia’s has that colouring. None of the children looks like her mother—is that why, in spite of nursing them through fevers and all the childhood diseases, dressing them so smartly and making sure they get their vitamin this and that, and brush their teeth at night, she’s held herself apart from them? As if her heart’s a small room into which she’s locked herself, with no place for anyone but her parents’ ghosts and whatever she thinks she might have made of herself if she’d never married, or at least, never married him.
“Bonnie,” he says, sitting her down on the rock, heaving himself up to its broad, blank face, the water sluicing off his back, trickling through the brown thicket of his chest. “Bonnie, I want you to be a help to your mother this week. It’s hard for her with Chucha Marta here.”
“Yes, Tatu,” Bonnie says, shifting closer, leaning her small, damp body in its frilled suit towards him.
“You know your mother’s still sad about Baba Laryssa. It takes a long, long time to get over …” His voice trails off; he is reluctant to say the word death in front of his daughter, just as he wouldn’t be able to tell an off-colour joke, or swear in the presence of any of his children.
“Tell me again about Chucha Marta,” Bonnie asks, “and why we have to be nice to her.”
He sighs, and stretches out his legs so they lift slowly from the water, then splash back.
“You know that when Baba Motria and your Dyeedo Martyniuk came to Canada—”
“There was a war on.”
“Clever Bonnie. Can you tell me which war?”
“Worldwarwon.”
“Exactly. And at that time, the part of Ukraine where Baba and Dyeedo were living was under Austria.”
Bonnie pictures her grandparents in a pool of murky water; someone is trying to hold their heads under, the way Pavlo Vesiuk tried to do with her last week, though she never told on him.
“If Baba and Dyeedo hadn’t escaped, secretly, in the middle of the night, Dyeedo would have been taken into the Austrian army. He would have ended up in the trenches, he would probably have been killed. A friend came to warn him: they had to flee.”
Bonnie bites her lip at the word flee: it’s a sign that something terrible is coming, the part in the story she can never understand.
“You know that Baba and Dyeedo had two little girls back in the old country. They were very sick; they had diphtheria. The name doesn’t matter—what you have to remember is this: there were no doctors and no medicine. No one knew if those little girls would live or die—they were far too sick to be moved. And so …”
He doesn’t say they got left behind. He doesn’t say it was ten years before the sister who survived got off the train at Union Station, a sign round her neck, so that the parents who couldn’t recognize her any more, and the brother she didn’t know existed, would be able to greet her. He doesn’t say that Marta did not laugh or cry or spit or smile all the way from Union Station to the dark, narrow house on Dupont Street where she finally fell asleep clutching the carpet bag that had been her only luggage, and sucking her knuckle. He doesn’t want his daughter to know what he knows.
“You have to be kind to Chucha Marta because of what a hard life she’s had. She doesn’t mean to be scolding and complaining all the time—it’s just the way she is, like someone with a handicap, with a blind eye, or a wooden leg. A week isn’t such a long time, Bonnie. Be as nice to her as you can, it’ll make things easier for your mother. I’m trusting you—you’re the only one I can trust to help me out like this.”
Bonnie puts her arms around her father and leans into his chest. The thick hair tickles her, the ooze of suntan oil that hasn’t yet washed off in the water. She is thinking not about Chucha Marta, nor about Baba Motria and Dyeedo Martyniuk, long in their graves. She is wondering whether Chucha Marta’s sister is with Baba Laryssa, looking down at them all from the edge of God’s eye in Heaven.
“Okay, Rybochko? We’d better go back.” Little fish: it’s his pet name for her, though he’s long been reconciled to “Bonnie.” Funny, how after his father’s thunderings and his mother’s head-shakings, he’d finally come to realize that Bonnie is the perfect name for this daughter, the only name that could ever do her justice. Rybochka is a pet name, a private name, but Bonnie is the name under which she will sail out into the world, a flag spelling happily ever after. Funny, too, how after all these years and all these second thoughts, he has never been able to confess as much to Sonia: You were right, and I was wrong. What if he had told her last night, when they got into the sagging bed together, the bed with the antique mattress he’s been meaning for years to replace? With something new, untouched and unstained, far too good for the cottage. Far too good, but never good enough, and yet exactly what is needed now.
Bonnie clambers onto her father’s back, hugging his neck just tight enough that she won’t fly off when he dives. It always terrifies her; her stomach is a knot like a tangled skipping rope as they plunge. Holding tighter as they hit the water, she swallows a mouthful, coughing and spluttering, as her father calls out, “Dobreh, Rybochko?” and she can barely answer back, “Dobreh, Tatu.” And it’s true; everything is fine as they swim back to shore. As long as they’re together like this, everything will always be fine.
Hungry or not, the whole family sits down to what Sonia calls “a proper supper” at six o’clock each Sunday, while everyone else, Katia keeps pointing out, eats sandwiches on the beach, or does a lazy barbecue—hot dogs, hamburgers, relish for a vegetable—on the lawn. “We are not,” her mother answers, “everyone else. Decent families sit down to a proper Sunday meal together.” You are a decent family, sing the ham that’s been roasting for the past three hours, the potato salad and runner beans and glazed baby carrots on plates Laura thinks of as planets stuck in low gear, or seats on a Ferris wheel with a stalled motor. Plates her mother heaps with food, then hands to Max to pass round, the first one travelling from Darka to Laura to Katia to Bonnie to the guest, Chucha Marta.
“Is anything wrong, Marta?” Sonia calls out to the woman sitting with lips pursed, fork poised to stab the ham as though it were going to rise from the plate and attack her. Marta’s shrug is the only answer Sonia gets: Things can’t help but be wrong in a household run by such a featherbrain, so what’s the use of asking? Immediately, the ham on Sonia’s plate starts to looks raw and slippery, the potato salad becomes a pile of furred, white pebbles, as Max says, “Smachnoho,” and the eating begins.
What little talk there is takes place in Ukrainian, the children reduced to “Please pass the milk” or “May I have the butter?” “I suppose the traffic will be bad tonight,” Sonia says to no one in particular, to ease the strain. Max just shakes his head, and Marta, making a comment on the stupidity, the waste of buying summer cottages, might just as well be spitting out a caterpillar.
Sonia sits back from her plate, on which the food’s been cut up into pieces small enough to fit the baby’s mouth. She is studying some screen inside her head on which is projected the intricate ballet of bringing Marta to the cottage in the first place. Max driving through a brown haze of traffic down Queen Street, going under the railway bridge, past the sweet stench from Canada Packers to the mausoleum of a duplex in which Marta’s been waiting since nine that morning. There’s no need for him to stop off at home, since his cottage gear is stored at Kalyna Beach—his new swimsuit, his golfing pants, his windbreaker and short-sleeved shirts, which he hardly ever wears. For the most part, he spends the weekend in droopy trousers smeared all over with oil stains, or a faded swimsuit in place of shorts, with an even more faded appliqué of a woman in a black swimsuit doing a jackknife from an invisible diving board.
Chucha Marta’s house is the last of the dozen or so houses Max grew up in. Against all common sense, he gave it outright to Marta when their mother died, though she’d willed everything to him: house, furniture, books (all the Ukrainian classics, plus Ukrainian translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, none of which Marta will ever read, but whose spines she lemon-oils religiously). Marta makes him wait at the door, forcing him to ring the bell and pound where the knocker should be, till she feels paid back for the endless hours he’s kept her waiting. When she finally opens the door she doesn’t kiss him or even say his name in greeting, just points to her suitcase at the top of a steep flight of stairs (she’s refused Max’s offers of free renovations: moving her bedroom downstairs, putting in a bathroom on the main floor so she could rent out the top floor if she wants, or simply board it up).
Staring down at her untouched plate, Sonia allows her imagination to add scrolls and flourishes to the script she’s devised. She watches Max struggle with Marta’s case to the car—there must be bricks in it, or gallon jugs filled with powdery dirt from the doll-sized yard. She sees her husband opening the back door for his sister, who refuses to sit beside him in the front—That is the wife’s place, Marta’s saying. Thank God I am no man’s wife. Two blocks on, she makes him turn back; she has to check that the stove’s turned off, the upstairs windows closed, the door to the summer kitchen locked. When she gets back into the car at last she makes him swear, yet again, that when he returns to the city late on Sunday night, he’ll stop by—then and every other night that she’s away—to make sure no one’s broken in.
By the time they reach the highway it will be hopelessly clogged, and will continue so for the next three hours. Marta, thank God, will have nodded off to sleep, though she’ll wake up every time traffic slows to a standstill; wake up to give Max assorted pieces of her mind on whatever subject occurs to her—the small investments he’s made on her behalf (she suspects him of trying to steal her life savings), the bills he sorts out and pays for her, the weather (those Russians are putting chemicals in the clouds, preventing any rain from falling—didn’t he know that? She heard it from the bishop, the same one who addressed the congregation when the Russians sent up Sputnik, assuring them that they’d find green cheese up there, and nothing more). Sonia lifts her napkin to her mouth to smother her laughter. Max doesn’t notice, but Marta stares at her, those flinty eyes that seem to nick the surface of everything they touch.
“I’ll get the dessert,” Sonia says, scooping up her plate before anyone notices how little she’s eaten.
“Chucha Marta,” one of the children calls out. Sonia clutches the bowl of Jell-O she’s rescued from the overcrowded fridge. It must be Katia speaking—who else would dare to provoke her aunt’s attention? Calling her Chucha, too, when the child’s been told again and again that the proper title for their aunt is “Teetka,” that “Chucha” was Laura’s invention, baby talk they all should have outgrown by now. But Chucha Marta she remains and always will to her nieces, especially Bonnie. She, not Katia, is the brave one calling on her aunt.
“What!” Marta barks.
Bonnie waits as if there’s something in her mouth that she needs to finish chewing. And then she blurts out: “What was her name? The sister who got left behind.”
Silence thick and quivery as the lumps of Jell-O Sonia’s dishing into the mismatched bowls. “Shh,” Laura hisses; Katia kicks Bonnie under the table, and even her father stares down at her as if she’s said something so terrible she will have to be punished. But she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about the dead sister all that afternoon. Suddenly the table and the faces turned to her with such ferocious disapproval go murky, as if they’ve been plunged into dirty water. Bonnie stuffs a finger into the corner of each eye, to stop the tears.
“Sonia, are you going to stand all night over that bowl? Can’t you see your husband needs to get on the road? It will be midnight before he gets home. Give us the rest of our dinner!”
“Here you go, Marta,” Sonia says, making a point of serving her first. Isn’t it just like Marta to go for two birds with one stone, accusing her of being a bad wife as well as a heartless sister-in-law?
Max takes out his handkerchief and mops his forehead. Thank God Marta didn’t hear. What an idiot he was, talking to Bonnie this afternoon—now he’ll have to unsay it all, warn her not to bother Marta again, to keep out of her way. Sonia will be after him, urging him to stand up to Marta, have it out with her at last. If only he could get her to talk about that time in the war, what had happened to her after she’d been left behind; if only she would come out and accuse him—he hadn’t even been born when it happened—then maybe she wouldn’t have this power over him, making him bow to her every wish, and making Sonia rail at him.
She’s risen from the table, Sonia: she’s clapped her hands. “We’ll have to hurry now. Come on, girls—pospeeshymo! Max, you can have your coffee later.” Sonia holds out his jacket in one hand, the car keys in the other.
He’s supposed to drive them out to Painter’s Point to see the sunset, the way he always does on Sunday nights. Marta knows perfectly well that Max prefers to wait till dark before leaving for the city—he says there’s less traffic, or at least, you don’t get so frustrated when you can’t see how slowly the landscape’s going by.
Marta folds her arms across her narrow chest. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“But, Marta, it’s so beautiful, and besides …”
Besides, if she doesn’t come, then Sonia can’t go, because someone other than Darka will have to stay behind with Marta, as if Marta were more helpless than Baby Alix. Marta, who lives every day and night of her life alone in the dark, twisty, narrow house on Dupont Street. Marta, who rushes to shut the curtains on every window as soon as the sun goes down. Marta, who takes pleasure, Sonia’s sure of it, in crossing her at every step.
“How can I come along? Use your head, Sonia, there’s no room in that car of yours.”
“Laura will hold Bonnie, and Katia can easily squeeze in beside you. I’ll have the baby on my lap—”
“You want to squeeze me in till I can’t breathe? Do you know what that will do to my heart?”
“I never said—”
For Christ’s sake, let’s just go before I pick up the axe and split someone’s head open. Of course Max hasn’t said this out loud, he’s simply grabbed his jacket and slammed the screen door behind him. The children rush after him. Sonia scoops up Alix in one arm, and shoves the other arm through Marta’s, walking her sternly to the car.
As for the sitter without a baby, she stands on the porch, her hands on her hips, the roots of her bleached-out hair shining darkly in the bold evening light.
Painter’s Point is a fifteen-minute drive from Kalyna Beach: it’s in a provincial park, and the view of the lake from the hills is especially lovely at sunset. They’ve watched the sky turn from gold to rose; now the sun is caught in a narrow band of cloud and looks like Saturn in Bonnie’s Wonder Book of the Stars and Planets.
The girls are sitting cross-legged near the edge of the bluff, apart from their parents, who are stationed at a picnic table farther back, with Alix and Chucha Marta. The grown-ups could be in three different rooms: one in a Toronto office, one at the North Pole with a baby on her lap, one in an old country that has the dim gleam of a black-and-white photograph. The parents are angry: what’s worse, they can’t even have their argument and be done with it, because of Chucha Marta. Yet while Marta pushes Sonia and Max apart, she brings Katia and Laura together, as close as shared hostility permits.
“I hate her,” Laura says. “I wish she’d fall into the lake and drown.”
“We should feed her salad made from rhubarb leaves,” Katia suggests.
“What if we took her for a walk down Tunnel Road and through the poison ivy patch?”
“She hates walking,” Bonnie reminds Laura. “She’s got arthritis.” She was going to tell her sisters about her plan for Chucha Marta, but decides that it has to stay a secret. And so she sits with her chin in her hands, her fingers caging her ears as Laura and Katia rhyme off all the reasons Chucha Marta is so awful.
Because she’s jealous of their father, who is handsome and successful.
Because she’s jealous of their mother, who used to be a fashion model, and is beautiful and married to their father.
Because she was made to polish their father’s shoes up to the day he got married.
Because she never got married.
Because her house is small and dark and the only chair with upholstery is still in its plastic wrapper, that’s gone all cracked and yellow.
Because she has a mole like a piece of chewed-out gum on her forehead.
Because there’s always a funny smell in the bathroom after she’s used it.
Because all she can cook is beans and wieners.
Because she’s never learned to speak proper English.
Because she’s got fallen arches and has to wear men’s shoes.
Because she was born a girl. If she’d been a boy they would never have left her for dead in the old country.
Sonia is watching the water that refuses to catch fire from a crimson sun. The weather’s turning, and they’ll be stuck in the house together the whole week long. If only she’d listened to Mr. Streatfield all those years ago, become the signature model for Sunny Sportswear … But where would she be now, at her age? There was no work, no paying work, for models getting on to forty. If only she were clever like Sasha, or solid, practical like Annie; if she could have done something else than stand before a camera showing off clothes she didn’t own, and a smile that wasn’t hers, she might have been able to be happy. Being happy, she’s decided, is like being beautiful: no matter how good your skin or bones, you have to work at it. She counts on her fingers the women she knows who could be called happy. Men she leaves out of it. They don’t need happiness—they have their jobs, their factories and offices and professions. But if happiness is something you’ve got to struggle for, what about misery—the kind of pure misery, powerful as ammonia, that Marta’s drenched in?
Marta was a child once—children are born neither happy nor sad, they get slapped at birth but it’s to make them breathe, not cry. Sonia’s mother had once said something about a woman she knew having drunk sourness in with her mother’s milk. Maybe that’s what happened to Marta. Of course she’d had a hard start in life, they must never forget what happened to her. Sonia’s mother would never have left a child of hers alone somewhere for eight hours, never mind eight years. Sonia swallows hard and puts her arm round Marta’s shoulder, wanting to say something welcoming, comforting. Marta shakes her off, glaring at her as if she is allergic to, or even terrified of, tenderness. All Sonia can think of now is how she’d like to grab the kerchief off Marta’s head and tie it round her face instead, like a gag.
“Girls!” They can tell from the sound of their mother’s voice that she’s just as angry as when they started out.
“Come on, kids, I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.” Even their father sounds cross.
They know better than to point out that there’s still a blob of sun that hasn’t dropped into the lake. They brush off their shorts and walk back to the car, following their father and mother and Chucha Marta, who carries her big black handbag on her arm as if it were the coffin she’d spent her life savings on.
Max emerges from the bathroom with his hair brushed, his face damp and fragrant from the soapy water he’s splashed across it. One by one he picks up the girls and kisses them; even Laura he holds high, and Laura weighs as much as her mother. Sonia puts out her face for him to kiss. His lips touch her cheek, and then he’s nodding goodbye to Marta, who’s never been known to kiss anyone, or to suffer being kissed. He waves to Darka, who lifts her hand distractedly.
As the car pulls away, Marta turns to Sonia. On her face is a look that could be mistaken for a smile. “He should have gone earlier.”
“He likes driving at night.”
“You should have made him leave at six, like the other men.”
“He leaves when he wants to, Marta.”
“He was angry—it’s bad to get into a car when you’ve been quarrelling.”
“We were not quarrelling.”
“If something happens to him on the road tonight, you’ll have to live with it for the rest of your days.”
Sonia turns on her heel. She goes off to the children, making sure they’re washed up and in bed; she turns off all the lights in the kitchen and living room. Out on the front steps the air is little cooler than the soup they have to breathe indoors, and yet she shivers, thinking of Max and the icy fist inside her, in the place where her heart should be. She closes her eyes, remembering those first years of their marriage, how they’d had to live with their in-laws, saving money so they could buy their own home outright: no debt, no being beholden. Laura had been born from the Martyn house; not until Katia was well on the way had they been able to move into a home of their own. She will tell all her daughters when the time comes for them to marry: live in a broom closet if you must, but live with your husband on your own.
Such freedom she’d felt on her honeymoon, the reckless joy of being alone with someone: intimately together. Not the sex so much as something tentative and trusting forming inside her. How it had showed itself in the way she’d been able to join in with Max, keeping it secret from everyone else, this new life starting between them. The teasing, the jokes, the codes they’d worked out to use in front of the waiters and the other guests at the hotel. She’d been stupid enough to take it all for granted, never giving a moment’s thought to whether or for how long it would last. So that when they came back—back to Motria’s endless sighs, and Marta’s sharp, narrow glances, all that buoyant joy had vanished. Locked into the bathroom that first night at her in-laws’ house, they’d splashed and giggled in the tub together, until Max’s father had started banging on the door, bawling them out for wasting hot water. She had frozen, right then and there, as if the bathtub had become a snowfield, and her nakedness were something raw, skinned over with ice.
Last night, when Max had leaned over her, stroking her bare arm shyly, as if they’d never lain together before, that was how cold she’d been. She’d tried to open her arms to him, but they’d felt like laundry frozen to the line. All the words she’d practised saying, all the endearments, every attempt at gentleness in her voice had come out as anger and reproach. About Marta, how he let her bully him, scare his children, and wipe the floor with his wife. And Max had sworn under his breath—how could she blame him?—and fallen back to the lumpy mattress; he’d turned his back against her, abandoning her to the stew of her misery, her helplessness, everything she couldn’t show him, share with him, any more than the drowning can share the air in the lungs of their would-be rescuers.
Sonia’s seen how fast Max drives when he’s angry; she knows how tired he is. Already she hears the knock on the door, sees herself at the hospital, and then the funeral parlour, the white bewildered faces of the children, Marta in her customary black, croaking ya tobee skazala, I told you so. How the loving widow, her lips quivering, will long to throw herself on his body, and how the embittered wife will hold herself back, all the words she could never say to him stuck in her throat, words she’d been made to feel afraid of, ashamed for him to hear, even in the dark. If she could call him back, if it were somehow in her power to make the car turn round and bring him back, she would cover his face with kisses, let him make love to her again and again, and let there be another five or ten or twenty children born, it wouldn’t matter, if only she could bring him safely home.
It is not her imagination, it really is the car, wheels churning up gravel, the door slamming. Max, safe and well, walking up to her. It’s like watching a film in slow motion; there’s all the time in the world for her to see and know what is happening; how the fist of her heart, instead of letting go, clenches even colder and tighter. So she doesn’t throw herself into his arms as she’d longed to only a moment before, when the drive was empty and the car had vanished. She simply sits on the step, looking up at him as he says, “Forgot my briefcase,” and goes inside to pick it up from the coffee table where he left it. And then he’s back again, so quickly the children haven’t had a chance to register his presence; he’s at the car and she forces, has to force, herself to rise and go to him.
“Max,” she calls out. He turns to her, impatient. He’s already in the city, thinking about tomorrow’s cases, that world of his with which she has nothing to do. Instead of sorry, or even just drive safely, she says, “Don’t speed.”
He gets into the car, slams the door shut. But then she stands by the window until he finally rolls it down.
“What is it now, Sonia?” That weary inflection of his voice. He’s as bad in his way as Marta—why had she ever married him, the both of them?
“I don’t want you dead, that’s all.”
“No such luck.” He starts the car, and then remembers: that is Peter’s line. He isn’t Peter; he refuses to be. And so Max stretches out his hand and puts it on his wife’s cool, slender arm. “It’s only a week and then she’ll be gone. You won’t have to see her here for another year.”
She looks at his hand on her skin: she touches it, lightly, so quickly that he can’t be sure she has made the gesture at all. Her voice when she speaks at last is muffled, as if she’s talking in her sleep.
“It’s okay. You’d better go now.”
This time he drives off for good.
Wherever Chucha Marta goes, even if she’s only moving from her bedroom to the kitchen or from the kitchen to the living room, she always takes her handbag with her. It belongs to her, Bonnie decides, like the scarf she wears on her head, or her underclothes. The handbag is black: it fastens with a shiny gold-coloured clasp attached to a spring; if you were foolish enough to try to open it, your hand would be snapped off clean. This is what Chucha Marta has told each one of them, even Baby Alix, who has shown no signs of wanting to snoop and pry. The clasp on Chucha Marta’s handbag is first cousin to her only other treasured possession: a mink collar made of one long pelt, with small, sorry paws dangling from it, and a fiercely pointed head with brilliant, beady eyes. The mouth of the mink opens like a clothespin to snap shut on its tail: from the start of November straight through to the end of April, Chucha Marta wears the mink collar on her plain black coat, to church and funerals and family gatherings at her brother’s house.
No one can remember a time when she didn’t wear black. Bonnie imagines a small, skinny Chucha Marta—no smaller and skinnier than Marta is now, but aged fifteen instead of fifty-three—getting off the train at Union Station. She’s wearing scratchy black woollen stockings, a black skirt and blouse, and in place of the head scarf, a straw hat with roses round the brim. Young as she is, Bonnie knows a straw hat would never have survived the journeys in farm wagons and crowded trains and steerage berths that her aunt would have suffered through. Yet she has to give her one article of dress less ugly than her standard gear, something as fragile yet detailed as the clothes worn by Bonnie’s cut-out dolls.
What’s in Chucha Marta’s handbag? Secrets, Bonnie thinks. She’s seen her aunt pull all kinds of objects out of the great black bag. Balled-up Kleenexes, a cracked change purse made out of some bashed brown material that tries to look like leather, keys on heavy metal rings. Small, flat boxes of Aspirin for Chucha Marta’s arthritis; tubes of Rolaids (taken copiously and conspicuously after dinners prepared by Bonnie’s mother). Bobby pins and paper clips; small combs with half the teeth missing; even a candle stub and a box of matches. But there’s vast numbers of other things in Chucha Marta’s handbag, secret things that make a rich rattle whenever the bag’s lifted up or shoved down. The bottom of her aunt’s handbag is as Bonnie imagines the seabed to be: littered with treasure from ocean liners like the Titanic and the Andrea Doria, about the sinking of which Laura’s read to her, from a magazine.
Bonnie is sitting on the sofa in the living room; it is Monday morning, and she’s still in her pyjamas, wrapped up in a cotton blanket. Complaining of a headache, she’s asked her mother if she could stay up at the cottage rather than go down to the beach—stay with Chucha Marta. Her mother’s face, already creased with the day’s impending complications, tenses.
“Are you sure? Really sure?” She puts her hand on Bonnie’s forehead, checking for fever, calculating the odds of this being scarlatina, since all four of her daughters have already had chicken pox and measles. At last she gives a small sigh and says yes, Bonnie can stay in the living room, as long as she doesn’t make any trouble for Marta; as long as she keeps herself wrapped up and quiet on the sofa. But to Sonia’s astonishment, Marta insists on her sister-in-law going down to the beach with the others. She’s no invalid or idiot child, Marta declares—she doesn’t need to be spied on, kept under observation. No, she will not have that fool of a Darka foisted on her. And yes, she is perfectly capable of keeping an eye on the child.
Heading for the beach, Sonia wonders what kind of game Marta’s playing: halfway down the stairs she’s about to turn back, run inside and rescue Bonnie, when she tells herself that she’s overreacting. She’ll go up to check on them both in an hour’s time.
Marta and Bonnie are alone together, or at least they occupy the same room. For Marta seems oblivious of her niece’s presence. Her eyes are fastened on the piece of crochet work in her hands, work that puzzles Sonia’s daughters—why does Chucha Marta spend so much time making holes out of thread? What do her tablecloths do but show what’s underneath them, what they can’t hope to cover up? Dozens and dozens of tablecloths that Marta makes obsessively, and that Sonia stores unused in a trunk in the basement.
“Chucha Marta?” Bonnie calls from the sofa.
There’s no reply but the tug of thread through the crochet hook. Bonnie tries again, going over to the chair by the window where her aunt is working.
“What was she called?”
“Who?”
“You know.”
“Why should I tell you? It’s a secret.”
“Please tell me. I promise I won’t let anyone know.”
Chucha Marta puts down her crochet hook and draws her handbag onto her lap. She frowns at Bonnie, and the mole on her forehead doesn’t look like chewing gum any more, but wet and purple, the way you might imagine a bullet hole to be.
“Why do you want to know?” There is no softening of Marta’s voice, no lessening of suspicion. It’s almost as though she’s been expecting the question, inviting it, for the sheer pleasure of denying her niece what she most wants to hear.
“Because I’m sorry that I never knew her,” Bonnie says. “If I know her name, then maybe I can make her up in a story, the way I do our-brother-who-died-before-he-was-born.”
“You’re crazy. You can’t make people up out of nothing. The dead are dead, and they’ll stay dead no matter how much you call them to come back.”
“My brother’s five now. He’s got hair just like Tato’s, and he’s so smart he can read the newspaper already—” Bonnie stops speaking, not because she’s run out of things to say, but because Marta has slapped her face, hard enough to make the skin burn and then go numb. Bonnie has never been hit before.
“Never talk like that to anyone again. That baby’s a secret—he’s not your secret, he’s your mother’s. You keep him in here—.” Marta may be pointing to her heart, but she’s holding up her handbag against her chest and thumping it as if it were her breastbone.
Bonnie doesn’t cry out, and she doesn’t cry, though her face stings and the whole room is shuddering from the force of that slap—the curtains shake on their rods, even the glass in the picture window shivers. She sits there watching Chucha Marta clutch her scarred black handbag to her chest, and then, summoning all her courage, she puts her hand out to the bag and touches it.
“Your sister isn’t a secret, Chucha Marta. Tell me her name.”
For a moment, Bonnie’s afraid that her aunt is going to hit her again, but Marta only grips the handbag tighter before letting it drop to her lap. And then she opens the clasp and plunges into the jumble of things that swim in that dark, sealed sea. She pulls up an ancient peppermint, closes her hand round it, then reluctantly offers it to Bonnie. But the child won’t touch it; she just stands there, waiting. Till Chucha Marta snaps her handbag shut and answers her.
“Lyalka,” she says, at last.
Bonnie nods—she knows that word; it means doll. A nickname. Her dead aunt was Chucha Marta’s baby sister, the way Alix is hers. Bonnie’s about to press Chucha Marta about her sister’s real name, her proper name, when Marta speaks again.
“She had your eyes. Brown, with little gold fish swimming in them. And your hair—just that golden red.”
Bonnie nods, trying to keep her mouth from falling open. For Chucha Marta’s voice, as she has spoken these words, is the voice of an utter stranger. It isn’t harsh and shrill any more: it’s hoarse, as if the tenderness in it has grown a rough coat of rust.
“You are too trusting, little one,” Marta whispers in the same hoarse voice. “Someone has to teach you not to trust anyone—not your parents, and not God either.”
When Sonia comes up from the beach to check on them, she finds Marta crocheting, her back turned to the window overlooking the lake, and Bonnie asleep on the sofa, clutching her blanket high against her face.
Thick as thieves, Sonia moans to Sasha. Her daughter, her beautiful little Bonnie, who has never made trouble for anybody, the one even Laura loves without reservation, is thick as thieves with Chucha Marta.
Sasha pours Sonia a glass of ginger ale with a dollop of gin in it. Sonia is too upset to know how strong her drink is; in fact, Sasha observes, Sonia is as upset as she’s ever seen her. It must have to do, she thinks, with the death of Sonia’s mother: Laryssa was the only one who could handle “the harpy,” as Sasha calls Marta, giving the word a Ukrainian flavour, rolling the r’s in a way that usually sets Sonia laughing. But not today.
“She says she pities me for being married—she goes on and on about how stupid I was to ever give myself away! She says I’ve turned Max into a spoiled child. And the girls—she makes it crystal clear what a rotten mother I’ve been—”
“Send her over here, Sonechko, and I’ll set her straight. Can you imagine what she’d say if she saw this house, and my kids? Come on, cheer up: you’ve only got her for a week. Thank your stars you’re not Annie. Can you imagine what it’s been like for her, having her mother-in-law move in with them even before they got back from their honeymoon?”
But Sonia derives no consolation from comparison of her lot with Annie Vesiuk’s. She drinks up her gin and ginger ale and walks foggily back to the cottage, where Darka’s been left in charge while Marta naps. (Sonia hadn’t been able to tell Sasha what Marta’s judgment on Darka had been.) At the steps leading up to the screened porch—the rotting steps Max has been promising all summer to fix—she stops, listens for any noise of battle inside, and sits down to puzzle out what’s happening. It’s not that Marta’s showing any sign of affection towards Bonnie: it’s just a sense Sonia has of a thickening of the air between them, of something holding them together like the loops of thread in Marta’s crochet work, the webs she spins like the spider she is. And that’s what makes Sonia so uneasy—not the thought of Bonnie as a fly caught in Marta’s web, but of Marta turning the child into another, smaller spider, infected with Marta’s own bitterness.
She sits with her head in her hands, resisting as long as she can, and then resigning herself, at last, to Bonnie’s defection. If it were Laura instead of Bonnie, she would put a stop to it, even if it meant bloodshed—and Marta is the kind of person who makes you think blood. Laura, Sonia’s often thought in her dark, dark moods, is really Marta’s child—she can see in Laura the same foul temper, the will to sour and spoil things. How can it work that way—that a child could be born not just with her aunt’s shade of hair or shape of foot, but also with her spitefulness? And how can Bonnie seek out Marta’s company, how could she not run screaming from that harpy hooking a hangman’s noose disguised as a tablecloth?
On Tuesday Bonnie had spent all morning with her aunt. She’d been ordered down to the beach in the afternoon, but had raced back to the cottage before any of the others, supposedly to help Sonia make supper. She’d spent too much time looking into the sitting room, where Marta was jabbing at her crochet work, to be of much help. The third morning no excuse was offered: Bonnie got dressed with the others, but instead of trooping down to the lake with them, she settled onto the sofa across from Marta, with some old National Geographics and the piece of cross-stitch she’d been torturing for as long as Sonia could remember. “It’s okay, Mama,” she called out, “I’ll stay up here with Chucha Marta while you go down to the beach.” It was then that Sonia had proved weak—she should have ended it then and there, but the thought of being down at the beach with all the other women and their children, instead of spending the day with Marta in the confinement of the cottage, was too tempting.
On Thursday, she put her guilty foot down. Bonnie was looking pale: she needed to be out in the sun, that’s what they’d bought the cottage for in the first place, to keep the children strong and healthy, soaking up vitamin D. Her sisters missed her company; Darka needed Bonnie’s help with the baby. So Bonnie went sadly down to the lake, and Sonia punished herself with cleaning out the big sideboard where the battered games and incomplete puzzles were kept, the odd socks and broken things she could never bring herself to throw away, in case their mates could be found or their innards fixed—and that she hated herself for hanging on to, out of some reflex of early poverty. Keep a thing and its use will come—you never know when you’ll be worse off than you are now. Her father’s words, spoken with the gravity of experience.
But within an hour, Bonnie had sneaked back to the cottage, back to Marta, who betrayed neither pleasure nor irritation at the small girl with scuffed sandals, the child-skin smelling of lake water and suntan oil. After lunch, Marta had gone off to her room as usual, taken off her dress, and lain down on the bed in her slip, with her lisle stockings rolled up to her knees. She’d slept for exactly two hours, emerging disgruntled, as if sleep and dreams had lost any power to refresh her. Bonnie had taken her nap in her own room, as always, and Baby Alix in hers, while Katia and Laura visited their friends. Darka had held the fort while Sonia fled to Sasha’s in despair.
By Friday, there was nothing left for Sonia to tidy or sort through in the cottage. She’d sent Bonnie down to the beach with the others, giving Darka strict instructions to keep her there, but Bonnie had crept back up—to use the washroom, she explained later on—how could anyone scold her for that? But what had been stranger, and far more disturbing to Sonia, was this: how, while she was off making lunch, leaving Marta crocheting by the picture window, the woman had vanished. Sonia had come out of the kitchen to ask whether Marta would prefer boiled or devilled eggs, and had found an empty chair. She’d made a fool of herself, calling Marta’s name, searching every room, even the bathroom, frightened half to death her sister-in-law might have had a stroke or heart attack there and be lying in a heap by the toilet. Sonia had found no trace of Marta until she’d rushed out to the lawn: from the lookout point under the empty flagpole, she’d seen the two of them, side by side. They were standing at the very edge of the lake, where the water rolled in clear and intricate, like some ruffled fabric far more delicate than glass. The two of them, Bonnie and Marta, standing side by side on the smooth, packed sand, Bonnie in her flip-flops and Marta in her men’s shoes, her stockings rolled down to the ankles, water splashing over her toes.
Side by side, not touching, but seeming to be holding hands, though what Bonnie was clutching was one of the straps of Marta’s handbag, while her aunt held the other, the bag suspended between them like a sad, dark fish.
Sonia knows, of course, that it’s not going to last, this collusion between Bonnie and Marta. Not only that it won’t last, but that when the rupture comes, it will be painful. But she hasn’t expected it to be brutal.
It happens on Saturday morning—just after Max has finished his coffee. In spite of the traffic having been so awful last night, so that the car didn’t roll into the driveway till midnight and Sonia was on the verge of calling the police; in spite of how late it was before he was finally able to fall asleep, his nerves keyed up, his neck muscles aching, Max doesn’t allow himself to sleep in. Sonia is reading the letter he’s brought her from Olya. Marta has emerged, at last, from her room, and is standing by the table, looking over Sonia’s shoulder in a way that would have infuriated Sonia if she hadn’t known that Max’s sister had never learned to read in any language. Marta doesn’t wait for Sonia to finish with her letter, or for Max to drain his coffee cup before she drops the bomb:
“She’s been stealing money from my purse. I caught her red-handed!”
Sonia, clutching Olya’s letter, is about to leap to Darka’s defence, when Marta cuts her short.
“Bonnie—what kind of a name is that for a child! And what kind of a child would steal from a poor old woman who has nothing, nothing in all the world!”
Sonia is speechless. Max, on the other hand, falls straight into Marta’s trap. When he protests Bonnie’s innocence, Marta cries out in triumph.
“My own brother is calling me a liar. The only family I have left in the world, and he accuses me of lying—which is even worse than stealing. Why don’t you just take that knife—” she is pointing to the bread knife, its handle loose, its teeth dulled—”and stab me to the heart. To the heart!”
There is more in this vein, and before he knows it, Max is apologizing to Marta and promising that he will speak with Bonnie; he will punish her. As for Sonia, she has stormed out of the kitchen and over to Sasha’s house—she doesn’t trust herself to go down to the beach, she would explode in front of the children. Liars, the two of them, Max and Marta—for Max’s promise to punish Bonnie is so much hot air, he is grovelling in front of his witch of a sister. Though if he dares say a single word to Bonnie, if he so much as frowns at her, she will pack up the children, all of them, then and there, and—. As for Max, he has gone out to the porch and yelled for Darka, who finally shows up, flustered, from the laundry room in the cellar, and agrees to sit with Marta while Max goes down to the lake to have a word with his daughter.
Even Sonia, who’s in no mood to forgive anyone, acknowledges the cleverness of Katia’s plan. Max is as grateful and astonished as he would be if Katia had shown him the solution to a legal problem that had stumped him.
The word Max had with Bonnie was, of course, a confession of helplessness and not an accusation. If Bonnie didn’t apologize publicly to Chucha Marta for what she hadn’t done, there would be outright war. And if she did pretend to have stolen coins from Marta’s handbag, there would also be war, if not murder: Sonia was in a state, he confided—he didn’t have to say what kind of a state. Though the last thing he’d ever wanted for his daughter—any of his daughters—was to have her mixed up in a lie.
At which point Katia, who’d been hovering on the sidelines, spelled out her strategy: their father was to give Bonnie fifty cents and send her to Mrs. Maximoynko’s store. There she would buy a slab of Mackintosh’s toffee, for which Chucha Marta is known to have a weakness. Bonnie would take the toffee to the cottage and present it to Chucha Marta, saying she’d borrowed the money from her aunt to make her a going-away present. Not having any money of her own, what other way did she have to spoil Chucha Marta? For everyone knew that Chucha Marta would never buy treats for herself.
“Is that okay with you, Bonnie?” her father asked. Bonnie nodded her head quickly. There were some things you shouldn’t think about too hard or too long, and the surrender—the weakness—of a beloved parent was one of them. So she duly went off to Venus Variety with two quarters in her hand and returned with the toffee, which she now presents to Marta, in front of everyone. She isn’t able to say a word, though: it’s her father who has to explain that borrowing isn’t stealing; how a surprise is nothing like a theft.
Chucha Marta stands there, her handbag clutched in her arms, her lips tight, her small eyes glittering. She too refuses to speak, except by finally taking the toffee from Bonnie’s hands and throwing it to the floor. Whereupon Katia nimbly jumps in, picking up the package, extracting the toffee, now shattered into bite-sized pieces, and handing them round to everyone. Only Bonnie and Chucha Marta refuse to eat. Not a word more is said on the subject.
Sonia makes and dishes out lunch, after which the younger girls go off for their nap, and Laura and Katia sit on opposite sofas, reading, or pretending to read, battered copies of Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames. Chucha Marta has her customary rest, and makes her customary fuss at the supper table, though everyone smiles politely, as if she has been praising the food and the company’s manners to the skies. For tomorrow Chucha Marta is going home; their father will head back to the city earlier than usual, so that this will be the Last Supper—until Christmastime, at least.
Everyone goes to bed early tonight. Katia’s been allowed to sleep over at Tania’s house, as a reward for her cleverness, but the rest of the family is apprehensive lest Marta break the shaky truce they’ve all agreed to. Bed seems by far the safest place, even to Bonnie. Tonight, Laura isn’t asked to let her sister into her bed, to tell her stories. Listening to Laura’s steady breathing, Bonnie lies awake, thinking of the trick Chucha Marta has played on her; paying back, in some small way, the trick her own parents had played on her, leaving her behind with a dying sister as they ran away to Canada.
But is it a trick Chucha Marta’s played, or has she given Bonnie a lesson? And what should she take from what her aunt has tried to teach her? The curtains let in a stab of moonlight. Bonnie closes her eyes tight, until she’s able to see a house unlike the dark, dank, narrow one on Dupont Street, or her own split-level suburban home, or even the cottage, with its thin, white-painted walls. In the dark in her head, lanterns are moving through a wooden house with chicken legs like Baba Yaga’s hut in the book of fairy tales. People are throwing clothes into chests, gathering up pillows and bedding. Except for one room, in which two little girls are tossing and turning, their bodies simmering with fever. An old woman is sitting beside them, rubbing their faces and arms and legs with a cloth dipped in well water, squeezing water from the cloth onto their gummed lips. The old woman looks just like Chucha Marta, with her black clothes and her old black scarf like a beetle’s shell. But one of the children lying on the bed is also Chucha Marta, and the other is her sister. Lyalka: Dolly.
And now the dark wooden house, filled with lanterns and people with huge, soft bundles in their arms, gives way to a scene of broken trees and drifting smoke. Guns are firing, and people run in all directions, searching for shelter. A girl in a black dress trails after them, clutching someone’s skirt or trouser leg, so as not to get lost in all the smoke and ash raining down on the road. Sometimes she hears Russian being spoken around her, and sometimes Polish or German; some of the time—the only time she may be safe—she hears Ukrainian. She spends four years running like this, never settling, never having time or means to go to school or learn to do anything but survive. Until finally the war stops, like a watch that’s run down, and she’s taken back to the village where she was born, to relatives who take her in because her own house has been burned, and there is no place else for her.
And just as she’s beginning to forget her life before the war, just as she’s given up hope that anyone will remember her, send for her, a letter arrives in the village, a letter from a strange city in a foreign country. In the letter is money, and instructions for Chucha Marta, who is now older than Laura, to take the farm cart, and then a train, and finally a ship and then another train to the place her parents will be waiting for her. One of the relatives, or maybe only a neighbour, comes with her all the way to the boat. Who takes care of Marta on the boat? Bonnie can’t picture this, or what it would be like to find yourself so utterly alone, even when she remembers how she got lost, one time, on a boat to Centre Island. How she sat on the steps leading to the upper deck, people nearly crushing her with their feet, until she heard her father’s voice calling out her name. She just sat there, her throat parched, with no voice to answer him, and yet she wasn’t afraid, for she knew he would keep on looking and calling till he found her.
What must it have been like stepping off the train from Halifax, which to Bonnie is as remote a place as Austria? People speaking nothing but babble all around you, none of the words you know in Ukrainian or Polish or Russian. Around her neck, Marta has a signboard spelling out MARTA MARTYNIUK in the Cyrillic letters Bonnie has just learned to write at Ukrainian School. And here, at last, are the parents Marta last saw ten years ago, greeting the daughter who looks nothing like the dying child under the lantern’s light. Here is the brother who has taken her place, and the place of her dead sister. What do they say to each other on the platform at Union Station—do they just go home, have supper, wash the dishes and go to bed?
It is late by now, late enough for all the lights to have been switched off, and all the grown-ups to be asleep. Bonnie lies listening to her sister’s breathing in the bed across from her; looks at the moonlight cutting through the windows. Against the white-painted walls she makes out shapes and stains projected like images from the home movies her father takes every Christmas. And suddenly it comes to her, one of those truths that startle and convince at the same instant. If Laura were awake she would call out to her, crawl into her bed to whisper the truth of the secret Chucha Marta has been hiding from them all this time.
But Laura is sleeping and besides, Bonnie has learned that secrets—someone else’s secrets—are something you are bound to keep. And so she lies back in her bed, with her hands clasped tight, as if to keep from letting go of it. Not the real name of Marta’s sister, but the fact that her aunt has forgotten that name.
This is the only secret Chucha Marta keeps.
While Bonnie lies awake in the moonlight, Katia is wishing she hadn’t gone to sleep over at the Plotskys’, after all. For something’s surfaced between her and Tania, something that puts both girls on their guard.
They are standing before the spotted mirror in Tania’s bedroom, under a lamp filled with the bodies of fried flies.
“What did you call them?”
“Teddies.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Katia says crossly, elbowing Tania away from the mirror. If someone were to ask her why she’s so irritable, she would answer, on account of Yuri. For in some way that Katia doesn’t fully understand, but that she knows in her bones, it is because of Yuri (whom neither girl mentions by name, or even as “he”) that they are jostling for space in front of the mirror in Tania’s bedroom, their pyjama tops rolled up, the startlingly white skin of their chests exposed.
Katia touches the reflection in the glass: two small dark circles like tarnished pennies.
“Whatever you call them, yours aren’t any bigger than mine,” Tania declares.
“They’re not doing anything much for either of us,” Katia observes coldly.
Now it’s Tania’s turn to push Katia out of the way and to monopolize the mirror. The poor showing of their teddies is partly the mirror’s fault, she decides. It’s old and the silver backing is worn away in splotches; it looks as though it has some disease like the one that kills off her grandmother’s roses.
Tania frowns, pushing her elbows together, making a V of her arms. A faint line forms at her breastbone.
“Look, Katia, do you see that? It’s a cleavice.”
“No it’s not—it’s just your skin wrinkling up. You can’t have a cleavice without breasts, and all you’ve got are teddies. All we’ve got,” she adds, trying to be fair, pulling her pyjama top back down. They have both asked their mothers, in vain, for training bras. Sonia rejected the idea with a flat no, refusing even to discuss the issue. Sasha laughed, saying she’d never thought of breasts being like puppies or horses, needing to be broken in.
After Laura had turned thirteen, Katia had had a chance to read the You’re a Young Lady Now pamphlet that their mother had left on Laura’s bed one day. The pamphlet was tinted a soft pink, and the paper looked as if it were made of marshmallow. There were roses in soft focus on the cover, and the text was all in italics. Before Laura had come home from school, Katia had read it from cover to cover, but the purpose of the booklet had baffled her. It made no mention of the body parts whose names she’d learned years ago from the older kids at school and whose proper names she’d seen on a mimeographed sheet handed out by Laura’s Health and Gym teacher. The pamphlet was as bewildering as the “Modess because …” ads in their mother’s Vogue magazines, which always featured a woman with prominent collarbones in an evening gown, standing alone on a terrace at sunset. “Because what?” she’d ask her mother, whose invariable reply was, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
Tania, however, had proved the best detective of them all; snooping in her mother’s dresser back home, she found, under the chiffon scarves and never-used embroidered handkerchiefs, The Woman’s Lifelong Guide to Health and Happiness, by Dr. Reginald Thwaites, a hefty volume containing a detailed description of puberty, pregnancy and menopause. She locked herself into the bathroom—the only room in the house to possess a lock—and wolfed down the first two sections, passing on the information in chunky parcels to Katia, and thereby supplying most of the information that You’re a Young Lady Now had omitted from its rose-coloured pages.
It had been a considerable shock to them both, this news that every twenty-eight days their bodies would start to bleed, and that they’d have to wear something like giant bandages between their legs. And curl up with hot-water bottles and take Aspirin for cramps that the book described as a rehearsal for the pain a woman experiences in childbirth. The idea that they will have to go through all this just so they can have babies is completely unacceptable to them: babies shriek in the middle of the night, and throw up on your shoulder or soak your lap when you’re asked to hold them. Babies generate mountains of wash, so that, from the time of their birth till they hit three, their mothers disappear behind a wall of white-flagged laundry. What is even more appalling is the fact that they will be expected to feed these babies from their own bodies, from breasts they imagine will turn as long and hard and narrow as the bottles dropped off in the milkbox each morning.
“We don’t have to feed babies—we don’t have to have babies—because you can’t have one without a husband, and we’re never getting married,” Tania had pointed out.
“Won’t we end up like Chucha Marta, then?” Katia had asked, imagining a fate even worse than being mummified in diapers: that of wearing a head scarf and old black cardigan all of your life, sitting in a house that smells sour as onions, and glorying in your own misery, as she’s heard her mother say of Chucha Marta.
“Of course we’re not going to become like her,” Tania had scolded. “We’re going to China, remember?”
Katia did remember, but now, as she lies back in the top bunk bed, with Tania fidgeting below her, she’s not so sure. Whether geography is stronger than biology. How far Tania is to be trusted.
The one part of puberty that does not seem to be disgusting or imprisoning, the girls have decided, is the actual growing of breasts. In fact, Tania’s mother’s book specifies that the pain and mess of menstruation are more than compensated for by the shy pride a young girl may take in the development of her bosom. If Tania had read further in the book, in a section called “Some Problems You May Need to Know About,” she would have learned about lumps and cysts, and changes in the breast that should be checked out immediately by a doctor. But she reads only the puberty section, from which she memorizes the various names for the parts of the breast (nipple, aureole, ducts) and agrees with Dr. Thwaites that breasts are not only desirable but downright prestigious. Unless, of course, you happen to have been born to a flat-chested woman.
It’s one more thing, one supreme grudge, to hold against their mothers. The girls understand what the term heredity means, and they’re unconvinced when Sonia and Sasha reassure them that of course they’ll develop one day—that every girl does. These speeches always end with remarks about how they should just enjoy being children; how these, after all, are the best years of their lives. Listening to such advice, the girls don’t groan, or shrug, or roll their eyes. Instead, they look down or away, embarrassed at the pity they feel for their mothers, who don’t understand how different their daughters’ lives will be from their own, and how the very shape of their future is tied up, somehow, in that most conspicuous of secrets, the growing of breasts.
Katia has no memory at all of Baba Motria, who died when she was the age Baby Alix is now, but what she’d loved best about Baba Laryssa, besides all the baking she did for them, and the preserving of strawberries and raspberries in thick glass jars, was her bosom. Lying with her head against it, falling asleep in her baba’s lap on winter afternoons, when she and Laura had been left at the big house on Dovercourt Road so their parents could attend what they called a “function.” In the summer Baba Laryssa wore cotton shifts in bright colours, with V necks; the skin of her bosom always felt cool and moist, reminding Katia of the times when she’d helped her baba with the kneading and punching of dough.
What Katia is thinking, as Tania’s fidgets finally give way to long, steady breaths, and Mr. Plotsky’s snoring rattles the partition, is that her mother had been some kind of exception to the rule; that had she worn a training bra, Sonia’s breasts would have attained the same bountiful size as Baba Laryssa’s, and as Katia’s own could do. Not once does she turn her thoughts to Chucha Marta’s hard and skinny chest: as far as Katia can see, her aunt can only doubtfully be called a woman, and had certainly never been a young lady. Lying back with her arms crossed tight, trying to shore up the muscles of what Dr. Thwaites calls the “chest wall,” Katia concentrates her thoughts instead on Mrs. Maximoynko.
Of all the women at Kalyna Beach that summer, with the possible exception of Darka, there is no woman whose body so fascinates the girls as that of the owner of Venus Variety. Tania had once shown Katia a picture of the Venus de Milo with her arms cut off just below the shoulders, which only made her breasts the more noticeable. And there was nothing wrong with them as breasts, the girls agreed, until they saw Mrs. Maximoynko’s—really saw and appreciated them—that summer. After which they felt a generous pity for the Venus de Milo, who might indeed have given both her arms for the shopkeeper’s breasts.
Mrs. Maximoynko is barely five foot, stocky, strong and sporting that mysterious attribute called a widow’s peak, which no one has ever been able to explain to the girls’ satisfaction: why does she have one if her husband is still alive? Why doesn’t Mrs. Baziuk have one? Though very short, Mrs. Maximoynko never wears high heels because she thinks them an invention of what she calls “that devil known as the common man”—a phrase she pronounces as though what she has in mind is the common housefly. Mr. Maximoynko, she makes it known, is thoroughly uncommon: an excellent businessman, he runs Superior Fruits and Vegetables on Augusta, and knows enough, as she puts it to Pani Durkowska, not to bother her. The Maximoynkos had met in one of the Displaced Persons camps in Germany, after the war; they have no children. Such a shame, the women sigh; such a waste, say the men, raising cupped hands to their chests and making jokes about evaporated milk.
She is short, Mrs. Maximoynko, but she has enormous presence that makes you think she should be five foot ten at the very least. Partly on account of her voice, which is both deep and loud—if she stands at the door of her shop and yells after you as you’re running down to the beach with a Fudgsicle you’ve pinched from the cooler, you can be sure your mother will hear her half a mile away. She has never yet told on Katia and Tania, though she might have done so a hundred times over: for spoiling merchandise (the cakes with their pushed-in maraschino cherries) and minor shoplifting (not only Fudgsicles but also Jell-O powder to be poured from the waxy package straight onto the tongue, turning it purple, yellow, green and rotting the teeth, as Mrs. Maximoynko has observed to herself with grim content). Plus general disturbances, of course: bursting into fits of giggles at the sight of certain brand names: Skwee-Gee, Betty Brite.
The other source of Mrs. Maximoynko’s overwhelming presence, is, of course, her breasts. She is not a fat woman, and this makes the architecture of her bosom all the more imposing. There is no nonsense about her dress or appearance: habitually, she wears flip-flops, navy blue shorts and washed-out sleeveless blouses. But under the blouses, she wears a bra that, Sasha Plotsky swears, must have been designed by a structural engineer. She doesn’t care that the bra straps—broad slabs of dingy white cotton—are plainly visible on her shoulders, or that when she bends down to fish some disobedient sack of ice cubes from the freezer you can see right down her blouse to her brassiere and the flesh that erupts from the cups, no matter how many wires and ridges and bones there might be underpinning them. For they aren’t made of fat, or anything jiggly or jelly-like, Mrs. Maximoynko’s breasts, but a substance that makes the girls think of a cross between the marble from which the Venus de Milo is carved, and the resistless, overpowering flow of lava, as they’ve seen it in a documentary film at school. No one could push you around, they think, with those defences: you could cut your way through the most difficult life like an icebreaker cleaving vast northern seas.
“What do you think they look like when she isn’t wearing her bra?”
“Do you think she ever takes it off?”
“Of course she does—to sleep, and to put it through the wash.”
“I just can’t picture her without it. It’s like the Queen—she must take her clothes off to have baths and change into her pyjamas, but I can’t think of her without her crown, and those ball gowns she wears, and the elbow gloves.”
Some days later the girls have come up with a plan to spy on Mrs. Maximoynko; to create a situation in which she will expose herself without her bra on. They have been driven to this expedient on account of Darka, who has proven far less amenable to being spied upon than they’d hoped. The only window into Darka’s room is at the back of the cottage, located in a place where anyone could catch them lurking. Besides, they’d need a ladder—there are no trees under the window offering footholds and no shrubs behind which they could conceal themselves. The bathroom’s worse than useless: its sole window is equally high up, and smaller than a porthole. At last they decide that the only thing to do is to reverse their intention: they will attempt to catch a glimpse not of Darka’s breasts, but rather of her bra, from which they can hypothesize what the reality of her breasts might be. Of course, they’ve had plenty of chances to watch Darka’s breasts wiggle and jiggle as she picks up Baby Alix on the beach: the top of her two-piece is as revealing as any bra could be. But there is something about an intensely intimate object of dress that is meant to be hidden from view: a brassiere—any brassiere—has an aura of power about it that no bathing suit could match.
Darka is unexpectedly modest, or at least wary, as far as her laundry is concerned. While the washing line strung from the Martyns’ kitchen porch to the flagpole across the lawn is dotted, amongst the bathing suits, shorts and tops, sheets and socks and towels, with several pairs of white cotton panties as large as platters and the inevitable ribbony flag of a brassiere, more foam-rubber padding than anything else, Darka’s undergarments are absent. She was not, she’d decided early on in her stay with the Martyns, going to give those kids any ammunition. She’d anticipated the practical jokes—bras and panties being snitched off the line, waving from shrubs at the edge of the lawn or decorating the sand dunes. She’d mounted a laundry line in her room, from the curtain rod to the antlers of the one-eyed moose over her bed; she would swish her bra and panties through her bathwater in the evenings, then carry them rolled up in her towel to her room, where she could personally superintend their drying.
There is no lock on any of the doors at the cottage: it is one of Sonia’s rules that doors should be left open; on more than one occasion she’s found occasion to express the belief to Laura that a demand for privacy is tantamount to a confession of guilt. “If it’s not something you can do out in the open—other than changing your clothes or using the bathroom—then it’s something you shouldn’t be doing at all. Especially a girl of your age.” This rule was even more flagrantly enforced for Darka who, being that much older and more developed than Laura, gave all the more cause for alarm.
Tania had thought of involving Laura in their project, reasoning that three heads would be better than two in planning strategy, but Katia had threatened to throw the whole thing over if Laura was included. “She’ll tell on us—or trick us into giving it away. Besides, all she cares about is that stupid Cleopatra.” The extent of Laura’s involvement has been Katia’s borrowing, unbeknownst to her sister, the dog-eared Souvenir Booklet, over the photographs of which, in the cool privacy of the crawl space under the Plotskys’ veranda, the girls have pored. They have appraised the depth of Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavice, noting the beauty spot on her left breast, exposed by the décolletage of her Queen-of-Egypt dresses; they’ve attempted to discern, through the cloudy blue waters of her bath, the shape of the bosom that the water just covers, while dismissing the nineteenth-century engraving of a small-breasted Cleopatra kneeling before Julius Caesar. In the engraving, she is wearing what looks like the reverse of a brassiere: a contraption of broad leather straps under and around her breasts and over her shoulders, leaving totally bare a surface bland as the frosting on the cakes in Venus Variety, with nipples as ridiculous as maraschino cherries.
One afternoon, when they are supposed to be resting, and when Tania has come over to eat lunch with the Martyns, the girls get their chance. Bonnie and Baby Alix are sound asleep, Laura is off at the Shkurkas’ cottage, Sonia is paying a visit to Auntie Zirka, who has hinted that she’s been neglecting her, and Darka has asked them to keep an eye on things, as she’s got to go to the store for emergency supplies—by which they know she means the sanitary pads that Mrs. Maximoynko keeps behind the counter, dispensing them in brown paper bags to the needy.
They watch Darka disappear down Tunnel Road; they listen at the door where Katia’s little sisters are sleeping, then check from both the kitchen and the front porch to make sure no visitors are coming by, from any direction. And then they turn the handle to the door of Darka’s room, feeling a pleasurable guilt as they tiptoe inside, closing the door softly but firmly behind them.
It’s hot and close, though the window’s open behind the yellow curtain. Sun pours through fabric the colour of raw egg yolk: it bathes the girls, their hands and the objects through which they’re rifling in Darka’s chest of drawers. It doesn’t take long to find what they’re looking for: Darka keeps her bras (she has two, one of which she’s wearing) where you’d expect her to, in the top drawer, next to a pile of underpants shoved in any old how. The only other thing of interest is a photograph lying at the bottom of the drawer, a colour photo of a boy sitting in a fire-red convertible, with a black-and-white dog in the passenger seat. The boy has a University of Toronto pennant in his hand, and he’s waving at whoever is taking the photograph. On the back appears Jamie, March 12th, 1963, Toronto, Ont. in Darka’s stubby handwriting. The boy, Katia decides, is of little interest: it’s the red car and the spotted dog that draw her attention, so that she nearly forgets why they’ve come into Darka’s room in the first place.
“Quick, Katia—come on,” Tania hisses, forking out the bra. Together they examine the label. GOTHIC, it says. 38C. It doesn’t have foam padding the way their mothers’ bras do; it isn’t soft or clingy at all, but fashioned from harsh, stiff cotton. Even dangling from Tania’s hands like a pair of eyeglasses, the cups jut out into severe triangular points, like miniature pyramids.
“You first,” Katia says.
Tania pulls off her shirt, holding out her arms as if she were a knight donning armour for battle. Impatiently, Katia fastens the hooks, and Tania turns to look at herself in the mirror, both from the back (she bunches up the cups of the bra so that it looks to be a perfect fit) and from the front. This latter view is far less successful: Katia hands her some of Darka’s socks, rolled into tight little balls, and Tania stuffs them into the cups that droop so disconsolately from her chest. It helps, but only moderately so—what Tania sees in the mirror is nothing more than a mutant and unconvincing breed of falsies.
“Here,” Katia says, “put on your shirt—see if that helps.”
Tania buttons the shirt to just above where the bra cups start, then steps back from the mirror and examines herself, in front view and in profile. She puts her hands on her hips, and points one toe; she adjusts one of the cups, in which a sock is starting to come loose from its ball.
“Do you want to have a go?” she asks Katia, who shakes her head. In the yolky light in the small, stuffy room, things have taken on a confusing quality, as if time has suddenly jumped forward. It’s like her father’s home movie projector when a splice comes undone, and the film starts pouring out from the reel, with a stink of burning. What she’s seen in the spotty light of the mirror is not Tania’s reflection but an image of what Tania will be like when she’s grown up, when she stuffs foam rubber instead of socks into her bra. And what she’ll be is nothing more than a version of her mother, full view and profile. They have imagined it so differently; they were going to have adventures, take ocean liners to Shanghai, dig for gold in Siberia: the last thing they would ever do is become their mothers.
“Katia? Are you okay? Then help me get out of this thing.”
They think they hear the screen door slam on the front porch: Katia nearly tears the hooks off the bra trying to undo it. The brassiere is shoved back in the drawer, over the photograph, but the socks lie scattered on the floor where they fell when Tania finally tugged herself free. The girls haven’t noticed: they run wildly out of the room. If they hadn’t imagined the slam, if someone really had been coming home, they would have been caught, red-handed. But all is well: the little ones are still sleeping, Darka and Laura and Sonia are still off on their errands and visits. White faced, hearts pounding, they dash from the cottage. Minutes later, hunkered down behind the sleep-house, they decide that if they’re going to run the kind of risks they just have, they’ll need to get something out of the ordinary at the end of it all. And so they spend the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening devising a strategy for seeing Mrs. Maximoynko’s breasts.
The day after the raid on Darka’s room, the girls abandon the sand dunes behind which they’ve been sunbathing and set off for Venus Variety. Though it’s nearly noon, no one calls after them or is sent to bring them back lest they spoil their appetites; nearly everything happens as easily, as flawlessly as they’d imagined. Having confirmed Mrs. Maximoynko’s presence behind the cash register, and having, to avert suspicion, trailed down the aisles on which all maraschino-cherry-dotted cakes have been replaced by sponge rolls, the girls do not return to the beach when they leave the store with their licorice ropes, but sneak to the back, to the apartment Mrs. Maximoynko has made for herself out of an addition. Tania has a bobby pin at the ready to pick the lock, but the door swings open easily. The girls have an excuse ready if they’re caught: they will say they noticed a smell of burning and rushed in to investigate. After the tarpaper fire, they will say, everyone has to act on even the slightest suspicion.
No excuse is necessary, except, perhaps, on the part of the apartment itself. For it’s such a tiny, dingy space, crammed as it is with an Arborite table and chairs, a fridge and stove and sink, as well as a shower rigged up in a windowless alcove, and a toilet in plain view. What with the bed, the place is so cramped that they can’t imagine how Mrs. Maximoynko manoeuvres in and out; they can’t imagine anyone spending even an hour here. There are a few hooks in the wall, from which hang a dressing gown and nightie; you might have expected a calendar at least, or an ikon, but there’s nothing, just a coat of paint, that robin’s egg blue that Katia always associates with the classrooms in which she’s disgraced herself when asked to recite the tributaries of the Dnipro.
No silks and jewels, no marble bath—none of the trappings of a Cleopatra. Had they really been expecting them? Katia wonders. But what good are breasts like Mrs. Maximoynko’s if all they get you at the end is a shack stuck on to a variety store, and a husband who wholesales fruit on Augusta? And how are they going to get a look at those breasts if there aren’t any hiding places in Mrs. Maximoynko’s apartment? Their plan had called for them to conceal themselves behind a sofa or anything from which they’d have a vantage point for spying when Mrs. Maximoynko closed the shop, as she always did at noon, and lay down for an hour on her bed. They had seen with their own eyes the tightly closed curtains, lots of times; the real reason to shut those curtains, they had reasoned, was not to shut out the light, but because Mrs. Maximoynko took off her clothes for her noontime nap. Certainly they are sweating, now, in their shorts and halter tops; the shack’s tin roof might as well be a burner turned up all the way to high. Surely she’d at least take off her top, unhook her sweat-soaked bra, towel herself dry?
The girls look at one another, shrug. How Mrs. Maximoynko prepares herself for her hour-long siesta, they are in no position to discover. But now that they’re here, it would be a waste to just walk out the door—it would be weak. Tania nods at Katia, who steps up to the bureau, and prepares to pull open the top drawer, in which, they know, they’ll find a heap of brassieres with cups so big you could fit your whole head into each one. But before the drawer can be opened and a bra pulled out, they have registered what’s standing on top of the bureau, exposed for anyone to see.
If God is looking down at them with his big blue eye from the dome of the summer sky, He has decided to be good to them, this once. Mrs. Maximoynko doesn’t come upon them in the act of trespass, because she’s taking longer than she expected talking with Mrs. Senchenko about the supplies needed for Saturday’s party. The women are in the store, by the cash register; everyone else is home eating lunch; there’s no one to hear the girls slip out of the shack or catch them stealing away to Tunnel Road and hiding themselves in the undergrowth on the side farthest from the beach. They have forgotten all their mothers’ warnings about poison ivy and non-existent bears; they have plunked themselves down, catching their breath, unable to meet each other’s eyes.
“Could it have happened in the camp?” Tania asks, her voice streaked with bewilderment. She can imagine no other kind of camp but summer camp.
Katia shakes her head, furious. “That’s not the point.” Tania waits for her to explain, but there’s nothing more, just the echo of anger that Katia knows to be unfair, but cannot apologize for.
She is more than angry; she is terrified at what she’s suddenly been made to learn. For the secret displayed on Mrs. Maximoynko’s bureau isn’t in the order of a boy with a spotted dog and a university banner, or even a Luger, as Yuri would have liked to find. It is something far more potent, having to do with how cruelly the body can change its shape, and why. For anyone who cares to look, there it is: a card in a frame, a card containing a black-and-white photo of a young woman with a heart-shaped face and widow’s peak; a small woman, needle-thin, hollow-cheeked, her chest caved in. She is standing beside a baby lying on a table, a baby decorated with embroidered cloths and paper flowers, holding a cross in its tiny hands. A dead baby whose skeleton shape no amount of embroidery and flowers can disguise. At the side of the photo is an embossed cross, and words written in Cyrillic, simple words that you could easily spell out: My Baby Marusia, Died January 12, 1946, Germania.
When the girls finally get to their feet, they brush themselves off, though nothing of the woods is caught in their clothes or hair. They don’t even shake hands as they turn in different directions to walk home, to the cottages where their mothers are waiting lunch for them. Neither girl will be able to eat, whereupon their mothers will scold them for ruining their appetites, as well as for running off from the beach, coming home so late, worrying them half to death. (Unlike Sonia, Sasha will say this in what she calls her Sarah Bernhardt voice; unlike Sasha, Sonia will be as furious at her daughter’s misbehaviour as she is relieved to see her safe and sound.) Of their own free will, the girls will go to their rooms to lie down, without any fuss or complaining. So that Laura scarcely feels any pleasure at being free, for once, to come and go while Katia’s condemned to her room. And condemned as she is, it is Laura, not Katia, who must face the interrogation squad of Darka and Sonia, who confront her after lunch with the news that someone’s been sneaking into Darka’s room, going through her drawers, rearranging things.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Sonia says, when Laura starts to protest her innocence. “I don’t care who it was, but it’s going to stop right now, and you are going to apologize to Darka.”
Laura’s about to protest that it’s Katia’s doing (for since it wasn’t her, who else could it be?) when she decides this battle is not worth fighting. So she turns to Darka and says, in the sweetest singsong she can muster, “I’m so terribly sorry, Darka, for not going into your room, and not messing around with your things—as if I’d want to handle them anyway!” And turns and runs, slamming the screen door behind her.
Darka is sitting on the steps off the small porch by the kitchen, thinking over the situation. She has no reason to believe that Sonia would go so far as to actually rummage through her room; besides, Sonia’s too neat-and-tidy to leave sock balls lying under the bed. It has to have been one of the girls. Judging from the performance that’s just taken place, it hadn’t been Laura snooping in her room, so it must have been Katia, conveniently in bed with a tummy ache. Darka hadn’t wanted to get either of them into trouble—though God knows they deserve to be smacked, with all that they get up to. But she has to scare them off. So far she’s been lucky: they haven’t thought to look on top of the wardrobe, or else they haven’t had time to, yet.
Darka sighs, scratching the place in the small of her back that is always so difficult to reach; suddenly she hears a small rip. Kholyera yasna—she will have to mend her blouse again; it tore in that very place just two weeks ago. The same night that Mr. Martyn drove back to the city, after bringing that bitch of a sister to stay. They’d all gone off to look at the sunset—the Martyns, Marta, the children; she hadn’t minded being left out, like some Cinderella with dishpan hands and a khustka on her head. Of all the things worth looking at, for God’s sake, who would waste time on a sunset? She’d decided to race through her chores, then settle down with her stash of movie magazines: it was the best she could do in the entertainment line, stuck up at this nudniy beach. She had started laughing then, knowing what Jamie would do if he could hear her, thinking she’d said not nudniy, or “boring,” but nudie. She’d laughed so hard she’d hugged herself to stop her belly from hurting, and that was when the shirt had ripped, just as it’s done now, under the arm.
That was the reason she hadn’t gone to the door when he’d knocked, asking through the screen if Max was in. She’d just yelled from the sink, “They’re out at Painter’s Point. They’ll be back when it’s dark.”
He hadn’t said anything about waiting, but she’d heard no footsteps going back down the porch steps. She wondered just how long he’d stand there. The latch wasn’t fastened—he could have come in if he’d really had a mind to. But he’d waited—he’d outwaited her—and she’d finally put down the sour-smelling dishcloth, wiped her hands on the sides of her shorts and braved the screen door.
It was Frank Kozak, Lesia Baziuk’s “special friend.” Darka knew what that meant—she wasn’t the fool everyone took her for. From behind the screen his pale-pink skin didn’t stand out so much, nor did the sandy-coloured lashes round his eyes. It had been a nice enough evening, and the kitchen was steamy with dishwashing, so she’d decided to open the door and step out onto the landing. She can’t remember now whether she nodded at him, or ignored him as she made her way down the stairs to the lookout point across the lawn. She does know that she had to brush against him to go down: he took up room, he was like one of those plastic containers filled with gravel or water in which you plant a table umbrella so it doesn’t blow away. She grazed his belly with her arm; she smelled whiskey—a not unpleasant smell, golden, not sour like wine—and felt his breath on her face, her neck, the way you feel the sun on your skin the very moment you realize you’re getting a burn. And then she ran down the steps and leaned over the railing at the lookout, staring through a screen of leaves at the water below.
After a while it occurred to her that he might tell the Martyns she’d been rude to him—disrespectful—so she turned round to where she thought he was standing, but saw no trace of him. Then she guessed he might have gone inside to wait for the Martyns in their living room, reading an old issue of Look or National Geographic as the sunset blazed across the picture window. She thought they might not like her leaving somebody alone in the house like that, even a neighbour, so she ran back to the cottage, tramping up the steps and slamming the screen door behind her as loud as she could, to give him notice of her intentions. But there was no one on the sofa; no one’s feet were up on the coffee table. And then she remembered that she’d left a pot to soak, and that Sonia would get after her about it. It was when she went to finish her chores that she found it on the windowsill, as if it had been waiting for her there all day.
Sphinx Pink. Its metal cap looked like gold; when she pulled it off and swivelled the lipstick up, she saw that it had never been used. It wasn’t Sonia’s, left out by mistake. It was hers.
The very next evening, he’d come by again. This time Sonia had been inside with Marta, and Katia and Laura had been sent to their rooms in disgrace, for fighting at the dinner table. She’d been on the little porch off the kitchen, throwing soapy water onto the parched bed of dill and parsley below: Sonia can’t stand anything to be wasted, even dirty dishwater. Darka paused for a moment, with her elbows on the railing, as if waiting for something—and sure enough, it had come. A movement first, in the bushes beside the sleep-house, and then a soft whistle. She left the basin on the porch and made her way down the steps towards the sleep-house. If Sonia were to see her, she’d tell her the truth: that she was investigating something fishy in the bushes. But Sonia hadn’t been looking; no one was there to witness how he beckoned to her from the side of the sleep-house, and she followed him, walking carefully because of the poison ivy. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask him why he was doing this. She does wonder whether she was just being stupid, or whether she wanted not to know.
Her special friend. He didn’t offer her a drink from the silver flask he carried with him and that she could see in outline beneath his sports jacket. He said he didn’t like to see young women drink—or had it been young ladies, was that what he’d said? He had an air about him, that’s for sure; he was always nicely turned out, smelling of Old Spice as well as the whisky. They stood behind the sleep-house where no one could see them from the cottage. There was a small moon, low in the sky, and it painted rough silver on the leaves of the bushes around them. He didn’t say anything for a long while; then he pulled from his pocket a compact, not plastic, but that same shiny metal as the lipstick tube, and put it in her open hand like a giant coin from some pirate’s hoard.
“They work you hard here?” he asked. With concern, she thought, not just out of curiosity. She started talking a little, telling him what her chores were, and how boring it was, each day the same. When she told him about how she was made to do the laundry day in, day out, how her knuckles were rubbed raw by the washboard, he asked her where; she’d been about to show him her hands when she understood he was asking where she did the wash. She told him about the cellar, how cool and quiet it was with the pack of them gone down to the beach each morning. And sure enough, when she went off to do the wash right after breakfast the next day she found, propped up on the scrubbing board, a small, prettily shaped bottle of cologne, the glass ribbed and twisty, the cap shaped like a heart.
Later that day, down at the beach she heard the women talking about him—how he was up for his week of holiday, more’s the pity for Lesia Baziuk. “I guess we women are gluttons for punishment,” somebody said, and Darka remembers hugging her knees and smiling, liking the sound of the word glutton, liking even better the secret that none of the women knew she was keeping.
The next day, when she went to the cellar, she nearly jumped out of her skin, opening the door and seeing him there. He was leaning against the wall, his pale skin and sandy hair making him look like a giant mushroom in the cool dark. She’d been about to say something when he put his finger to his lips, pointing upwards: sounds of children running, doors slamming. The family was getting ready to go to the beach, though it would be another ten minutes or so before they’d make their way down.
“I have to get on with this wash,” she whispered, feeling she owed him an explanation. He said that was fine; he’d just sit there and enjoy the coolness, if that was okay with her. She shrugged and continued with her work, though she couldn’t help darting glances here and there to see if he’d brought her anything. She realized, suddenly, that she’d never thanked him, and then decided he didn’t want her to—he’d be embarrassed, or he’d think her no better than a little kid. Liz Taylor—you wouldn’t hear her saying please and thank you very much, not for a measly tube of lipstick!
How strange it had been, going about the washing, her back turned to him, feeling his eyes on her as she wiped a hand across her forehead to catch the sweat, or wrung out the clothes, then stood with her hands on either side of the sink, watching the dirty water swirl away. She had her two-piece on under her shorts but no shirt, so her back was exposed, the straps criss-crossed so they wouldn’t keep sliding off her shoulders. She was aware of the smell of her skin—the moist, slightly sour smell in her armpits that she couldn’t disguise no matter how much deodorant she put on, and the ripe smell of her hair, which she hadn’t had time to wash that morning. At last she’d turned to him, a basket of rinsed and wrung-out clothes weighing down her arms. He made no move to help her, he just said, “Come back when you’re finished—come back when they’ve left,” reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small, thin, silvery cylinder.
“Mascara,” she’d said, by way of an answer.
Laura’s the one who named it Tunnel Road, because of the way the trees reach across the asphalt, joining overhead as you walk or drive below. So the road really belongs to her, she thinks, walking quickly along, tripping over a stone or fallen branch, or sometimes her own feet; trying to pull her head up from her shoulders as her mother’s always telling her to do. Though it’s not because of her mother’s nagging, this attention to her posture; it’s because she needs to learn to walk like a Queen, an Empress of the Nile.
On one side of the road are cottages, and on the other, woods dense with spruce and cedar saplings and slender, grey-barked trees. Through the dark leaves, light boils like bubbles in ginger ale; if you walk as far as you can through the undergrowth you find places where coolness rushes up, the way it does when you pass the opened door of a cellar on a scorching day. They are always warned not to go into the woods because of poison ivy, and because of bears, but the children pooh-pooh this; Katia glimpsed a skunk once, making its way through the brush, and several porcupines have been sighted. Her cousin Yuri says he heard wolves howl at night, but no one believes him: wolves belong in fairy tales, not at Kalyna Beach.
At the end of Tunnel Road is the Shkurkas’ cottage. Next to the Plotskys’, it’s the oldest building at the beach, and it’s certainly the smallest. It needs fixing—the floors sag and the roof is nothing but patches, but Nettie Shkurka says she can’t afford to have a man in to do repairs. She says this at the store, or stopping in front of various cottages when she takes her morning walks along Tunnel Road, her daughter at her side, pale and plain as a pot of porridge. Nastia, who never looks anyone straight in the face and has a sleepwalker’s abstracted gait. When the Shkurkas pass by, the women on their verandas wave and remind themselves to tell their husbands to stop by at the small, decrepit cottage to see if they can’t give Nettie a hand with things. Though they know they will never carry through with these good intentions. There’s something so self-satisfied in Nettie’s misfortune, Sasha says—something so righteous in her feeling herself to be poor and neglected and eternally shining up that crown in heaven she’s buying on the instalment plan. And then Sasha laughs and says she never could understand how Nettie ever let a man near enough to father that poor, scared rabbit of a daughter.
Laura has seen a picture of Mr. Shkurka that Nastia keeps folded in her prayer book: it’s not a photograph, but a blurred reproduction of one, printed in a magazine called Glory to Ukraine! There was an article on the Displaced Persons camps after the war, the educational and cultural events the inmates had organized there. Ostap Shkurka had been part of a musical ensemble including singers from the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theatre; they had staged parts of Taras Bulba with improvised costumes and minimal props. The picture showed Mr. Shkurka in a sheepskin hat and wide-skirted coat that were far too big, making him look like a small boy dressed up in his father’s clothes. He had played the part of the son who betrays his father by falling madly in love with a Polish countess. “He had a wonderful voice,” Nastia had whispered, holding out her hand for the magazine clipping, as if terrified her mother would walk into the room and find them. Laura had nodded, wondering if Nastia really could remember her father’s voice—she’d been younger than Alix when he ran out on them. And what if this Ostap Shkurka in the magazine had nothing to do with the man who was Nastia’s father? What if he was someone who just happened to share with him a name as common in Ukraine as Joe Smith is here?
Now Laura is on her way to the Shkurkas’ cottage, having waited and waited for her mother to settle down in her bedroom with the book hidden in her night-table drawer. It’s not that her mother would forbid Laura to spend time at the Shkurkas’, but that she’d go on at her about how Laura should be making friends with other girls as well, girls less delicate and, though Sonia never says the word, peculiar. Laura never responds to her mother’s criticisms and suggestions, but just stands staring past her, shoulders slumped like a drooping shawl. Her mother doesn’t know anything; doesn’t know how Mrs. Shkurka keeps Nastia under her thumb, as if she were a prisoner so important she has to be guarded day and night. If Laura wants to see Nastia, she has to see her at the Shkurkas’, or not at all.
Always, when Laura knocks on the Shkurkas’ door, she’s met by Nastia’s mother. For such a snip of a woman, she has an unusually powerful voice. Sometimes she refuses to undo the latch of the screen door: Anastasia’s asthma is acting up again, she might say, or Anastasia’s got a sick headache, or else a rash. Whatever the plot of Nastia’s “bad days,” the story always ends the same way: Anastasia has to lie down; she doesn’t want to be disturbed. Laura knows it’s useless, on such occasions, to ask if she could just call to Nastia through the screen door, just as she knows, but cannot actually say to herself, that Mrs. Shkurka’s lying when she talks about Nastia not wanting to see her. Cannot say it to herself, or to any of the mothers, for they’ll never take her word for anything, and everyone knows that Mrs. Shkurka is a Mother in a Million. And so on bad days, Laura leaves the Shkurkas’ cottage, with its worn, grey walls and sagging shutters, and makes her way back up Tunnel Road, running the last few yards, till she reaches the birch tree with the sign bearing the letters MARTYN burned into the wood.
This afternoon she knocks at the door not hesitantly or defiantly, but with a certain cunning. She is not going to ask for Nastia when Mrs. Shkurka appears; she is going to ask if she can come in to borrow a book on the kingdom of Ancient Rus, which, as Mrs. Shkurka has so often told her, is the Glorious Cradle of Today’s Ukraine.
Laura’s plan works—or perhaps she didn’t even need to try it, for when Mrs. Shkurka allows her inside, Nastia is waiting for her at the kitchen table. Nastia’s mother is a skinny woman with unnaturally pale skin and features thin as the teeth of a comb. If she were Nastia, Laura thinks, she’d have run away a long time ago from such a flimsy jailer. But then, who in the world is like Nastia? Pale, quiet, good as gold and far more pliable, Nastia seems to know what her mother wants of her before Mrs. Shkurka says a word or even gestures to her. In fact, Nastia is closer to her mother than Laura has ever thought it possible for any daughter to be. But then, Nastia has no father—or at least, he’s as good as dead and gone, and that would make a difference.
Nastia is sitting at the kitchen table, her long, long hair pouring down her back and over her shoulders like some dark, silent waterfall. Laura bites her lips when Mrs. Shkurka tells her to sit down and wait while she does Nastia’s hair. She watches as the brush comes down, hard, on her friend’s scalp; she notices the way Nastia nearly doesn’t flinch as her mother explains to Laura the importance of stimulating the oils in the scalp. Laura prefers not to look at Nastia’s face as Mrs. Shkurka proceeds to braid her daughter’s hair, pulling the strands so tight that the two long ropes hanging down her daughter’s back will look far more tense and indestructible than chain mail.
Nastia’s mother teaches school from September to the end of June; she drives up to Kalyna Beach on the first of July with boxes full of workbooks entitled Grammar without Toil and More Fun with Figures. Nastia’s shown them to Laura, and Laura can’t believe how they’re all filled in with Nastia’s perfectly neat handwriting, and pasted with golden stars that Mrs. Shkurka keeps in a small glass jar that used to hold horseradish. She also lugs up a gross of embroidery thread and coarse-grained linen from which she fashions cross-stitched bookmarks to be sold at Church Bazaars and Easter Teas over the coming year. She is a tireless supporter of worthy projects in the Ukrainian community, Laura knows, for Mrs. Shkurka has made no secret of what she calls her “causes” and has even tried, so far in vain, to recruit Laura to help her out with them, as Nastia will, once they return to the city. Laura has seen with her own eyes how ardently Mrs. Shkurka kisses the cross and the gold-plated cover of the Gospels at the cathedral each Sunday. She knows by heart how many A-pluses Nastia has racked up on her report cards over the years, for Mrs. Shkurka has never failed to tell her. So why, then, has Laura come back to the Shkurkas’ cottage over and over again this summer? Why does she befriend a girl like Nastia, the kind of prim, proper, perfect daughter that her own mother wishes she had?
Perhaps it’s because Sonia, for all the faults she constantly finds with Laura, has never warmed to Nastia. Down at the beach Laura once heard Mrs. Vesiuk telling her mother what a shame it was, the way Nettie had pinned her daughter down, like linen in an embroidery frame. And Sonia had nodded, saying something about how overprotective Nettie was, making Nastia wear those long-sleeved blouses and ankle-length trousers. She’s making a hermit out of that girl, Sonia had said—it’s all very well to say she has sensitive skin and needs to keep out of the sun, but to keep her locked away from all the other girls, as if she thought nobody was good enough for her, when anyone could see that. And then Mrs. Vesiuk had nodded, and they’d switched to some other topic, and Laura had been left trying to puzzle out her mother’s disapproval, not just of Nettie Shkurka, but of Nastia as well. For in spite of what she’d just told Mrs. Vesiuk, Sonia had never tried to invite Nastia over to their cottage; she had even hinted to Laura that it wasn’t a good idea, putting all her eggs in one basket as far as friends were concerned.
Laura and Nastia’s friendship has nothing to do with chickens, as far as Laura can see. They know each other from Saturday Ukrainian School, at which Nastia’s distinguished herself for her ability to memorize vast chunks of Shevchenko, Franko and Ukrainka, while Laura stubbornly refuses to answer anything she’s asked, and comes last in everything, from dictation to dancing, where her lack of balance and her inability to tell her left foot from her right make her sadly conspicuous. Yet it’s only this summer that the girls have really taken to each other, becoming as inseparable as their mothers will permit; that is to say, they spend the odd afternoon together, from one till three, the universal quiet time. On this particular afternoon, they are sitting out at the back, on rickety lawn chairs. The trees have grown up to block the view of the lake, and the path down to the shore is overgrown, though they can easily hear the waves crashing below.
Mrs. Shkurka sits close by in a rocking chair, doing embroidery while the girls talk, and listening in on their conversation with a clear conscience. She frequently chastises or upbraids them—most often because of Laura’s ruling passion for the history of ancient Egypt, which, Mrs. Shkurka constantly reminds her, is far less improving and important than the history of Ancient Rus. That depraved woman Cleopatra wasn’t to be mentioned in the same breath as the saintly Princess Olha—does Laryssa know that Olha sought conversion to Christianity, and tricked the Sultan of Constantinople into being her godfather instead of the husband he had so wickedly plotted to become? And does Laryssa also know that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, is descended in the thirty-first generation from a Prince of Ukraine? For King Harold the Second of England, killed at the Battle of Hastings by an arrow through the eye, had married his daughter Gytha to Grand Prince Volodymyr Monomakh.
Whenever Mrs. Shkurka lectures her like this, Laura turns her face away, making savage scowls or sticking out her tongue, shocking Nastia with her bravado. If Laura has to look Mrs. Shkurka in the eye, she bites the insides of her cheeks to stop herself from saying something rude. Such forbearance is only possible because sooner or later Nastia’s mother always falls asleep—she sleeps poorly at night and is ruining her eyes with her embroidery, Nastia says. Whenever she talks of her mother she sounds as though she’s quoting her—not Mrs. Shkurka’s exact words, uttered in the heat or damp of the moment, but what that lady would like people to believe she’s said. Laura isn’t interested in Mrs. Shkurka, and if the truth be told, her attachment to Nastia isn’t entirely disinterested. For Nastia has provided Laura with a rapt audience for her obsession with Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt and her alter ego, Elizabeth Taylor. Nastia can be counted on to listen, mouth agape, as Laura reads aloud whole paragraphs from the Souvenir Booklet she’s smuggled to the Shkurkas’ cottage:
She is a beauty beloved of photographers, for in the professional world of photographers it is axiomatic that it is next to impossible to take a bad picture of her.
She is the foremost star of the screen, because she is beautiful, and because she is an actress of enormous talent.
When she was not yet thirty, she fought and won a battle for her life.
The costliest film production in the history of the cinema, the finest accumulation of talents, surrounds her appearance as Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt …
“What do you suppose she was sick with—asthma?” offers Nastia.
“Of course not. She would have had some kind of terrible fever. They would have had to watch at her bedside night and day, feeling her fluttering pulse for vital signs.”
“Maybe it was T.B.”
“Maybe,” Laura answers cautiously.
“Lesia Ukrainka had T.B. She spent her winters in Egypt; she would have died of cold if she’d stayed in Ukraine.” Nastia brightens—it pleases her to be able to share this knowledge. It’s like a gift she’s making Laura, and she has so few things to offer. Emboldened, she ventures a little more. “I had a positive reaction to a T.B. test once. My whole arm swelled up and went bright red.”
“Then it wasn’t T.B. Elizabeth Taylor had, that’s for sure.” Laura knows she’s being unkind, but she has the actress’s glamour to protect, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing that Elizabeth Taylor and Nastia Shkurka could ever have in common. She decides to change the subject, reading out another passage from the Souvenir Booklet, one that sends shivers down her crooked spine. (Her mother is always at her to stop slouching, warning her she’ll be a cripple by the time she’s twenty.)
Burton is five feet, nine inches tall, is as wide-shouldered and rugged as a fullback, can blaze into righteous anger on occasion, and will calm down just as quickly. Splendidly educated, he will in conversation range over a host of subjects with keen, piercing intelligence.
If there’s anything that Laura longs for, other than being Elizabeth Taylor, it is the chance to have a keen, piercing conversation with Richard Burton. She imagines Richard and Elizabeth sitting by the pyramids or riding camels through the desert and ranging over a host of subjects: Shakespeare, and Shevchenko, and Skin Tone. Of course they wouldn’t discuss anything so trivial as the latter—but it so happens that Laura is preoccupied with skin tone right now, and she would dearly like to know what a splendidly educated man could say to her upon this subject.
If there’s anything that Laura envies Nastia, it’s her complexion. Not its colour—sallow, like ancient ivory—but its porelessness. A tight weave, something Laura’s heard her mother say about fabric: nothing can get in or out. Laura has terrible skin. Sonia’s is flawless. Once, watching Laura finish a plate of french fries at a restaurant, she had said, mournfully, “You had such beautiful skin when you were little.” As if it were Laura’s fault, Laura’s decision that the pores of her skin should each become a pit filled with tar; as if she’d taken a darning needle heated to some unimaginable temperature and gouged her face, every quarter-inch, with its tip. Gross pore structure: this is how it’s described in the beauty magazines Laura reads surreptitiously at drugstores and dentists’ offices. It’s a sign of ruggedness in a man, and hence desirable, or at least acceptable. Richard Burton, in his leopard-skin tunic, looking on at the banquet Cleopatra has conjured up for him, looking up, from under beetling brows, not at the Nubian dancing girls, nor at the platters of jellied peacock, but at the flawless skin of Elizabeth Taylor.
Nastia, unsure of whether her friend has fallen asleep or into a trance, reaches for the Souvenir Booklet lying in Laura’s lap. Timidly, she takes it up, turning the pages until she finds a passage that she reads out in her whisper of a voice:
If a scene requires from her the enacting of virtual hysteria, she seems to lose herself, as though unaware of the glare of the lights, the crew standing round. The moment the director has said, “That’s it!” she is back to herself again. Her hand reaches out for a lit cigarette (there is always someone there to supply it) and she waits quietly for the director’s appraisal.
“I have no acting technique,” she has insisted. “The only thing I know how to do is be.” Unfortunately, talent and schooling alone don’t guarantee a fine actress. Miss Taylor learned acting through acting, and was lucky enough, also, to be born with inherent talent.
For once, Laura isn’t angry or upset at having her thunder stolen from her. She makes no move to grab the Souvenir Booklet back from Nastia, but merely hugs her knees, repeating, “The only thing I know how to do is be,” her eyes gazing out at where the lake would be, if you could see through the screen of poplar trees.
“What do you think she means when she says that?”
Occasionally, Nastia surprises her with a question that triggers the deepest pleasure Laura has yet experienced: that of thinking something through for yourself, thinking past what you’ve been told or taken for the truth.
“Well, she has servants, of course—to do her laundry, and look after her children, and cook the meals.”
“Like Mrs. Senchenko,” Nastia suggests shyly, and Laura doesn’t dismiss the comparison. Of all the grown women she knows, Nadia Senchenko is the only one you could speak of in the same breath as Elizabeth Taylor. They both have a regal, distant quality, and nothing they do, no amount of mixing with ordinary people, could ever tarnish them.
“I suppose it means,” Laura continues, “that she doesn’t ever need to think, that everything falls into place for her.”
“That everything makes sense,” Nastia adds, “and nothing happens that isn’t supposed to. Or else that you can’t help being the way you are—it’s nobody’s fault what you look like, or who your father is, or why you can never do what you’re told.”
Mrs. Shkurka is snoring—a fact to which Laura makes no allusion whatsoever, knowing that Nastia would be deeply ashamed, and that as long as neither of them says a word about it, they can pretend the short, snuffling breaths, the almost animal sound, isn’t coming from Nastia’s mother’s mouth. Instead, they listen to the sound of the waves, Laura dreamily, remembering Cleopatra’s barge and the oarsmen beating time to a great bronze drum; Nastia shivering.
“I hate the sound of the lake,” she confides. “I hate hearing the waves pounding and pounding at the sand.”
They sit for a long while in silence together, until Nastia gestures for Laura to follow her to the bathroom. By now Laura is bored, and hungry: she feels like going to Venus Variety for a Freezie, or having a swim and then baking in the sand, none of which Nastia would ever be allowed to do. So there’s a frown on her face as she follows Nastia to the room where hangs the cottage’s only mirror, a large rectangle of silvered glass screwed into the wall: a pond for the fish on the wallpaper to swim round or towards, but never inside. The girls are out of earshot of Nettie but still Nastia doesn’t speak. Nor does she stare at her perfect, poreless skin in the mirror, or point out the flaws in Laura’s own.
What the mirror shows is how the frown on Laura’s face turns from resentment into astonishment and then to something almost like envy, as Nastia takes a nail file from a drawer and holds its point against the wallpaper beside the mirror, a place where tropical fish hide behind long, wavy reeds. With great neatness and control, she incises four words: I hate Nettie S. And then she puts her finger to her lips, miming the word secret and smiling, as Laura nods once, twice, three times, the way you do when you’re swearing a sacred oath.
The game, whatever it is—hide and go seek, fox and geese—is getting out of hand, Sonia decides. She leaves the picture window, from which she’s been watching her brother and his sons running helter-skelter over the grass, with Katia, Bonnie, Tania racing just as wildly after them. By the time she gets to the flagpole, where they’ve ended up, Yuri and Katia are sitting on Peter’s chest, Tania and Andriy have imprisoned his arms, and Bonnie is tickling her uncle’s nose with a long blade of grass. Sonia sits down on her haunches, looking at her brother’s face while he blows at the grass blade Bonnie’s waving. He’s still so handsome, she thinks. Having grown up with Peter, she’s always taken his good looks for granted, or registered them through the scrim of her mother’s warnings: how he was trading on his face instead of his brains; how he’d fall on that handsome face of his one day, and then where would he be?
“That’s enough, now,” she tells the children. “Leave him be—come on, up you get! There’s lemonade and cookies on the kitchen table.”
Peter makes a show of wiping his brow, and bowing down to her for having rescued him “from a fate far worse than lemonade.” Does Sonia have a bottle of beer anywhere in the house? Cold beer, warm beer?
She shakes her head. “Max will be getting some this weekend. If you don’t want lemonade, I can make you some tea, or iced coffee.”
“Ah, Sonia, the answer to a brother’s prayers!”
Peter sighs, standing up, brushing himself off, combing his hair with his fingers, hair blacker than a raven’s wing, she’d heard it described—by whom? Probably Sasha, with her literary bent. Black hair and brows and eyes; the kind of dark skin that laps up the sun and never burns. Just like a gypsy, their mother had always said—a gypsy’s child. He’d been treated so harshly, poor Petro. Boys have to be tough, their mother had said again and again. It does them no good to be fussed over. And when they’d come to Canada, their father had been just as severe in his own way, lecturing his son on the need to be serious, to have dignity, to pay attention to things that matter, things that won’t always go his way.
Peter helps her up; he offers her his arm as if they were strolling on some boulevard in their Sunday best, though she’s in shorts and a halter top, and his shirt is covered with grass stains. “Zirka won’t be happy—” Sonia begins, fingering a long green smear down Peter’s back.
“No, if there’s one thing Zirka’s bound not to be, it’s happy,” Peter agrees. But he throws the ball right back to his sister. “No more than you, Sestrychko.”
“Never mind me,” Sonia says, trying to find some way to turn the conversation in the direction Sasha has requested. She hasn’t got her brother’s gift with words—what their mother had reproved as “Tom flowery.” What if Sasha’s right, what if Peter is on some wild-goose chase to do with Nadia Senchenko, laying himself wide open to being talked about, shown up as an aging fool, no longer a lovably young one? What if she were to ask him point-blank what he’s up to? As always, Peter disarms her, stopping to pick a stem of devil’s paintbrush, with which he traces two circles on her cheeks, and the curve of a smile over her mouth.
“That’s better,” he says. “Now, my dear, you look like a woman on holiday, enjoying a run of splendid weather at the beach.” He even looks like Cary Grant as he speaks the words, in a voice so like Cary Grant’s that if Sonia had been blindfolded, she could have believed herself to be arm in arm with the movie star.
“Please, Peter,” she says, pulling away, looking him straight in the eyes. He’s her own brother, she grew up with him, crossed an ocean with him, learned a new language, a new way of understanding the world, in his company, and yet she knows nothing about him now: what he wants, what he needs, what he’s up to, if he’s up to anything at all.
“Yes, oh lovely one, Pearl of the Carpathians, Flower of the Sea of Azov, Goddess Incarnate of Kalyna Beach. Your wish is my command, although if you did have that bottle of beer, or better still, a shot of Max’s single malt, wherever he keeps it stashed away, I would kiss your little snow-white feet.”
Sonia sighs. She walks over to the washing line, where a few beach towels wait to be unpinned. Would he ever grow up? But then, why bother? Nothing he did could ever be good enough, he’d learned this lesson long ago, in the Old Place. A too-tall, too-skinny boy who was always getting into trouble: at school, around the house, with the neighbours. Who should have been a help to his mother, alone as she was, burdened with the running of a farm, the raising of two children, the absence of the man she’d married for love, not land, the disapproval of both sets of family, neither of whom would lift a finger to help, even when Sonia had come down with scarlet fever and the doctor had been called in from town, wiping out a whole year’s savings. And for every smack or scolding Peter received, she, Sonia, had been caressed, made much of, protected.
Even when he’d signed up to go to war, had come home to say goodbye, all kitted out in his uniform, all their mother had found to say was, “You—a soldier?” And true to form, Peter had belted out, “I hate to get up, I hate to get up, I hate to get up in the morning,” doubling up his fists in front of his mouth, blowing a slapstick trumpet. He’d made Sonia laugh, when she’d been biting her lip to keep her eyes from flooding. She should have shouted it out to her parents, right then and there: “He’s going off to fight, don’t you understand—he’s risking his life for us. Why can’t you be proud of him, just this once?” But her throat had seized up, her fear had choked her, fear of weakening their love, their support, fear of seeming to criticize the two people who’d given up everything they had to offer her this new, strange world she was supposed to call home.
Peter should hate her, by rights. Spoiled, adored, indulged as she’d been while he’d gone begging. The fact that he doesn’t resent her, that however much he jokes with her, he’s always been protective towards her—doesn’t that prove his goodness, deep down? How could he be capable of what Sasha thinks? Surely everyone must see that Peter hasn’t the pride, or the strength, or the blindness to make an approach to another man’s wife, especially if that man is rich and successful, so rich and successful that he can afford to bail out his brother-in-law time and again. And no one in their right mind could believe that Nadia Senchenko would give Peter Metelsky the encouragement of a mosquito! So what is the point of Sonia’s speaking to Peter about his intentions? It would only cause pain and confusion; it would only make everything a hundred times worse.
“Here,” Sonia says. She piles the beach towels into his arms, stuffing the clothes pegs into her pockets. “I’ll take a look in the sideboard for that single malt—”
But before she can finish, Peter has dropped the towels piled into his arms; has reached out to her, placing a hand on each of her shoulders.
“Sonia, tell me,” he begins, but what he goes on to say is so unexpected that his sister can give him no answer.
“What would you do if, suddenly, out of the blue, you were granted your heart’s desire?”