BO GOT ESQUIRE AND TIME MAGAZINE IN THE MAIL. Maureen read them cover to cover. He almost had his B.A. He read the Gormenghast trilogy and books by Carlos Castaneda and Ayn Rand. All of them were impressive to Maureen, but she found them almost unreadable. It was not the kind of writing that Maureen had ever been exposed to, and she imagined that it was worldly and scholarly. Maureen thought she didn’t like those books because they were too smart for her. Later on, she realized she didn’t like them because she didn’t like that fantasy stuff, and nobody past the emotional age of ten could actually read and take Ayn Rand seriously. But when she was living with Bo, she didn’t think she had the right to say what she liked and didn’t like, because, let’s face it, she was damaged goods. That’s how she felt after she had the baby—that she was ruined, that she was finished, that her chances of ever becoming that idealized girl were gone for good. So for Maureen to even have a boyfriend, let alone a boyfriend who had a car and almost had a degree, who read all the right books and seemed to be on the fringes at least of the totally cool crowd, was WOW. She was just so grateful, really, to have anybody, not to be shunned, cast out, cast aside. Just to get in out of it, out of the aloneness, and finally be paired up, she almost didn’t care with whom, as long as it was with someone.
That first Sunday and almost every Sunday after, Bo took Maureen out to his parents’, out to Paradise, for dinner. Not real Paradise—they weren’t dead, just living up in Conception Bay South, in the town of Paradise, which was not the least bit paradisal. Bo’s mom, Mrs. Browne, looked like a sweet, small, girl version of Bo but with all the lights turned out. Vera Browne (née Nichol) was Scottish and a war bride and had married Bo’s father, Art Browne, when Art was overseas serving with the Newfoundland Foresters. Vera was an orphan from Gorbals, who, against all odds, had gotten a scholarship to the University of Glasgow and received a Bachelor of Science. But because of the Depression and the general lack of tolerance toward girls with Bachelor of Science degrees, she had to go to work at Pringles department store in management training, and that’s where she met and fell in love with Art Browne. It must have been the Foresters uniform, Maureen came to think, because what else besides a smart uniform would have been attractive about the arrogant blowhard, the paranoid know-it-all with the short temper and the long wind.
The first Sunday Bo took Maureen to meet his parents, Mr. Browne flirted with Maureen about her long legs and said he’d always been a leg man. Maureen, pleased to get the attention, really liked Mr. Browne—until they sat down at the table and he boasted long and loud and made much of the fact that he was having lobster while the rest of the family was left having to share a measly chicken.
“It is only right,” Mr. Browne said. “I’m the man of the house after all, and I bring home the bacon—or, in this case, the lobster.” He laughed. “I deserve it, don’t I?” He turned to Bo and challenged him to say different. “Don’t I, Trevor?” Bo muttered his ascent and looked down at his plate, but Mr. Browne wouldn’t let him get away with that. “Speak up. What, are you afraid in front of the new girlfriend, are ya? Don’t let yourself be whipped, boy. Now, what do you say?”
“Yes,” Bo muttered again.
“What? I can’t hear you.”
And he kept at that until Bo, in a rage, stood up from the table and yelled out, “YES.”
“Sit down. Pull yourself together. You got to learn how to take a ribbing and stop getting hysterical like a little girl.” And then he winked at Maureen, and she felt sorry for Bo having to grow up in the shadow of that man. She almost said something, but Sara, also over for Sunday dinner, grabbed her hand, squeezed it and begged her with her eyes not to open her mouth. Mrs. Browne listlessly pushed the food around on her plate and didn’t say anything.
After dinner, Maureen was helping Mrs. Browne clear the table, when Mrs. Browne, laughing, turned to Maureen and said, “Awright, Maureen? When I married Mr. Browne, you know, I was so excited about moving to the New World. I thought I was going someplace like New York—maybe even somewhere better.” All this was said in a very thick, what Vera called her “Glaswegian,” accent.
“Art’s family were from a little wee place called Open Hall in Bonavista Bay, a heart-stoppingly beautiful place, but a good ways back from the back of beyond.” She put her hand over her mouth and said, “Oh, don’t let Art hear me say anything against Open Hall. It’s the Browne natal seat and must only be spoken of with solemnity and respect.”
She giggled. Maureen could see she was nervous. Bo came in then. He looked with suspicion at his mother and Maureen laughing. Later, Maureen understood that Bo was the type whose first thought if he heard someone laugh was that they were laughing at him. Vera waited for him to leave, but Bo stubbornly stayed in the kitchen, and so with some hesitation, Mrs. Browne continued to tell Maureen how she got from the slums of Glasgow to Paradise.
“When I got off the wee boat in 19 and 45, aye, it was ’45, in St. John’s, I thought I’d reached the end of the known world, but no, far from it. I still had to board the wee train and ride that all one day to the town of Trinity. But I still hadn’t gone far enough, and it took two dog teams, tearing through the frozen tundra, until I finally reached—”
“And you never really got over it, did ya, Mom? She’s been half-cracked ever since,” Bo said.
“Get off Mom’s back, will ya, Bo,” Sara said, coming into the kitchen and putting her arm around her mother. “Don’t mind him, Mom. Since he’s going for his B.A., he thinks his shit don’t stink. Yea, B.A. from MUN—that’s the two little x’s you put after your big X when you sign your pogey cheque.”
“Go fuck yourself, Sara.”
“Oooh, touchy.”
The smile had left Mrs. Browne’s face and she was back to drying the dishes. She didn’t have much else to say for the rest of that Sunday.
On the drive back to the apartment, Bo told Maureen that his mother was often in and out of the mental. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her. They kept changing her meds and hoping for the best. But she seemed to be getting worse.
“Worse how?” Maureen asked.
“I don’t know. She wants to be dead all the time or something,” Bo said, not taking his eyes off the road. “They are going to try shock treatment on her.”
Maureen had read Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and was terrified to think of little Vera being put in a vegetative state like Ellis or one of the chronics. But when Maureen said as much to Bo, he got mad and said they might as well shut up about it because there was nothing they could do anyway.
Bo was often mad at her and Maureen hardly ever knew why. She started to suspect that he didn’t really like her, especially when she talked or if she was feeling emotional about something. The first time Maureen got drunk with Bo, she went on a crying jag about the baby, and he just got up and walked out, leaving her there in Chamberlains. Maureen had to hitchhike home by herself.
A few days after that Sunday dinner, Mrs. Browne went into the mental, and three Sundays passed before they went back again for dinner. Maureen couldn’t believe what she saw: all of Mrs. Browne’s front teeth were missing. There had been some kind of accident during the electroconvulsive therapy. From then on, Maureen very rarely saw Vera smile, even when they were alone in the kitchen, even after she had gotten a new set of “choppers,” as Art called her oversized false teeth.
Maureen asked Mrs. Browne why she had let them go ahead with the shock treatment. Vera looked at her, her eyes dull, and said, “I needed it.” But later on, after she made sure that Mr. Browne was in his room with the door closed, she told Maureen that in the late 1950s, the doctors and Art had felt that a frontal lobotomy might do the trick. “But I had just enough spark left then to stop them.”
Maureen thought Mrs. Browne was amazing. Despite everything, she was always taking night courses at the university, she spoke six languages, and she somehow continued to survive around that house, quiet as a mouse, terrified to disturb Art in any way.