Elizabeth is sitting at the small desk in her bedroom (maple, c. 1875). It has a matching chair which she bought at the same auction. It’s a wonder to her how the ladies of that time ever managed to get their great cabbagy padded buttocks onto the chairs made for that purpose. You were supposed to perch gracefully, skirts falling, fake ass billowing around your hidden real ass. No visible support. The apparition of a cloud.
In this desk Elizabeth keeps: her checkbook and canceled checks, her bills, her budget, her lists of things needing to be done around the house (one list for urgent, another for long-term), her personal letters, and the journal she started four years ago but has failed to keep up. This desk has not been opened since Chris’s death.
She can now think: Chris’s death. She almost never thinks Chris’s suicide. This would imply that Chris’s death was something he did to himself; she thinks of it, on the contrary, as something he did to her. He’s not feeling the effects of it, whereas she still is. For instance, she has not opened the desk until now because in the upper left-hand pigeonhole, held together tidily by an elastic band, is the bundle of letters he was sending her in September and October; all on lined notebook paper in ballpoint pen, the handwriting becoming larger and more spidery until finally, on October 15, there had been just two words filling an entire page. She should not have kept these letters, she knows; she should throw them out now, immediately, without looking at them again. But she’s always been a saver.
She avoids looking at the letters as she bends over her checkbook. Now that she’s into it, she’s even getting a certain amount of pleasure out of it. Order from chaos, all those unpaid bills cleared out of the way, entered into her book. Nate has paid a few things that had to be paid — the phone bill, the hydro — but everything else has been waiting for her, sometimes with two or three politely outraged letters, requesting and then demanding. She likes to have her accounts settled, to owe nothing to anyone. She likes to know she has money in the bank. She intends always to have enough money for an emergency.
Unlike her mother, who’d sat crying for two days in the flowered chair by the window after their father was suddenly not there any more. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked the air, as if there was somebody listening who had a standard of behavior all ready for her. Her sister Caroline crawling up to her mother’s lap, crying too, sliding off repeatedly, crawling back up her mother’s slippery-skirted legs like some demented beetle.
Elizabeth had not wept or crawled. When it became obvious that their mother was not going to get up out of the chair and fix them dinner, she’d counted the quarters she’d been saving, the ones Uncle Teddy had been slipping down the front of her dress on their infrequent visits to Auntie Muriel’s big house. She’d gone through her mother’s purse, throwing the lipstick tubes and crumpled hankies onto the floor, finding nothing but a wrinkled two-dollar bill and some pennies. Then she’d let herself out of the apartment, using the keys from her mother’s purse to lock the door behind her. She’d gone to the little grocery store three blocks away and bought some bread and cheese and marched back carrying the brown paper bag, stamping her rubber boots hard on the stairs as she climbed up. This was no great feat, she’d done similar things often enough before. “Eat this,” she’d said to her mother, furious with her and with her sister. “Eat this and stop crying!”
It hadn’t worked. Her mother had sniveled on, and Elizabeth had sat in the kitchen, chewing on her bread and cheese, in a white rage. She wasn’t angry with her father. She’d always suspected he couldn’t be depended on. She was angry with her mother for not having known it.
• • •
It was Auntie Muriel who had taught her how to keep a bank account, how to balance a checkbook, what interest was. Although Auntie Muriel regarded most books as frivolous trash and even schoolwork as of marginal value, she’d spent a good deal of time on this part of Elizabeth’s education. For which Elizabeth is grateful. Money counts, Auntie Muriel used to say — still says, when anyone will listen — and Elizabeth knows it’s true. If only because Auntie Muriel enforced the lesson so strongly: she supported Elizabeth, paid for her well-made underwear and her blue tweed coats and her piano lessons, therefore she owned her.
Auntie Muriel’s attitude towards Elizabeth was equivocal. Elizabeth’s mother was no good, therefore Elizabeth herself was probably no good. But Elizabeth was Auntie Muriel’s niece, so there must be something to her. Auntie Muriel worked at developing those parts of Elizabeth that most resembled Auntie Muriel and suppressing or punishing the other parts. Auntie Muriel admired backbone, and Elizabeth feels that, underneath everything, she herself now has the backbone of a rhinoceros.
Auntie Muriel is unambiguous about most things. Her few moments of hesitation have to do with the members of her own family. She isn’t sure where they fit into the Great Chain of Being. She’s quite certain of her own place, however. First comes God. Then comes Auntie Muriel and the Queen, with Auntie Muriel having a slight edge. Then come about five members of the Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, which Auntie Muriel attends. After this there is a large gap. Then white, non-Jewish Canadians, Englishmen, and white, non-Jewish Americans, in that order. Then there’s another large gap, followed by all other human beings on a descending scale, graded according to skin color and religion. Then cockroaches, clothes moths, silverfish and germs, which are about the only forms of animal life with which Auntie Muriel has ever had any contact. Then all sexual organs, except those of flowers.
This is how Elizabeth puts it for the amusement of others when she’s telling Auntie Muriel stories; notably to Philip Burroughs of Greek and Roman, whose aunt is Janie Burroughs, who travels in the same wee circle as Auntie Muriel. Unlike Nate, Philip can be depended on to know what she’s talking about.
Auntie Muriel may be a droll story, but this doesn’t affect her malignance. She’s a purist as well as a puritan. There are no shades of grey for Auntie Muriel. Her only visible moral dilemma is that she thinks she ought to rank her family with the Timothy Eaton Church members, because of their relation to her; but she feels compelled to place them instead with the cockroaches and silverfish, because of their deplorable behavior.
Such as that of Elizabeth’s mother, which even now Auntie Muriel never fails to allude to. Elizabeth has never been sure why her mother vanished. Helplessness, perhaps; an inability to imagine what else to do. Auntie Muriel’s version is that Elizabeth’s mother deserted the family out of innate depravity — ran off with the son of her own father’s lawyer, which Auntie Muriel saw as a kind of incest and which luckily didn’t last long. She, Auntie Muriel, had rescued the deserted children and had begun immediately stuffing them with all the advantages.
Elizabeth, even as a child, did not fully accept this story. Now she thinks it may have been the other way around, that Auntie Muriel stole her and her sister away from their apartment while their mother was out on one of her expeditions, “looking for work,” she told them. Then, once Auntie Muriel had the children safely barricaded into her own house, she’d probably told their mother she was unfit and it could be proved in court if necessary. This is more Auntie Muriel’s style: self-righteous banditry.
She can remember the actual event but it tells her nothing. Playing movie-star cutouts with Caroline; then Auntie Muriel suddenly there, saying, “Get your coats on, children.” Elizabeth had asked where they were going. “To the doctor,” said Auntie Muriel, which seemed plausible.
• • •
Caroline at the third-floor window. That’s Mother. Where? Down below on the sidewalk, her face upturned in the streetlight, a sky-blue coat, Mayflies fluttering around her. Opening the window, smell of new leaves. Calling, Mummy, Mummy, both of them. Auntie Muriel’s footsteps on the stairs, along the hall. What are you yelling about? That’s not your mother. Now close the window or the whole neighborhood will hear. The woman turning, walking away, head sadly down. Caroline screaming through the closed window, Auntie Muriel prying her fingers from the ledge, the catch.
For months Elizabeth put herself to sleep with a scene from The Wizard of Oz. The book itself had been left behind, it was part of the old life before Auntie Muriel’s, but she could remember it. It was the part where Dorothy throws a bucket of water over the Wicked Witch of the West and melts her. Auntie Muriel was the Witch, of course. Elizabeth’s mother was Glinda the Good. One day she would reappear and kneel down to kiss Elizabeth on the forehead.
• • •
She leans back, closes her eyes. Dry eyes. Chris wanted her to quit her job, leave her home and her two children. For him. Throw herself on his mercy. His tender mercy. She’d have to be crazy, he’d have to be crazy to think she ever would. No visible support. He should have left things the way they were.
She sits up, reaches quickly for the bundle of letters, reads the one on the top. FUCK OFF. His last message. She’d been angry when she first read that.
She tucks the check stubs and paid bills and the duplicate rent receipts from the tenants upstairs into an envelope, marks it: 1976. That finishes off the year. Now she can start another one. Time hasn’t stood still while she’s been away, as she now thinks of it. She’s barely managed to hold things together at the office, but she has a lot to catch up on. The quilt exhibit, for instance, must be scheduled and promoted. The girls need new underwear and Nancy needs new snowboots: she’s been coming home for days with a wet foot. And there’s something wrong with Nate. Something is happening in his life; he hasn’t told her about it. Perhaps he has a new ladyfriend, now that Martha has been used up. He’s always told her before, though.
• • •
She riffles back through the days, looking for clues; at the base of her skull the old chill begins, the old fear, of events, cataclysms preparing themselves without her, gathering like tidal waves at the other side of the world. Behind her back. Out of control.
She stands up, turns the key in her desk. She has backbone. She has money in the bank, not enough but some. She does not have to depend, she is not a dependant. She is self-supporting.