Men want to be eagles. Women wish they were swans. I prefer cormorants. It’s my working-class upbringing. Gabe and I talked about this one day while sitting on the pier that extends beyond the mouth of the canal into the lake, the one with the lighthouse at the end. We were watching birds, a pleasant thing to do on warm evenings along the lake. We saw a vee of Canada geese fly over the strand, so lovely in the air and so crappy on the ground. We were always stepping into their droppings, and the damn birds would lunge at you if you approached during their nesting season. Geese, Gabe and I agreed, are best when served with sage dressing.
Gulls flew past, all wings and noise. Flocks of these garbage birds hang around the drive-in restaurant at the far end of the strip and fly up to the canal when they get bored, which they are when they’re not eating. Gulls are the scuzzos of the bird world. Nobody would want to be a gull.
I liked the little terns that scurried in and out of the water’s edge, snaring insects in the sand. Cute, like puppies, but not model material. Gabe liked the herons that lived in the marshlands to the north of the strip. Herons have a lot of class, but they’re ugly. Not just look-the-other-way ugly, but disgustingly ugly. I didn’t need to be a swan, but I refused to be a heron.
That evening, we watched dozens of black birds flying toward the shore from the lake, looking as though they knew exactly where they were going, and why. With graceful necks and tapered wings, they appeared more independent than the geese, who flew in military precision, or the gulls, who would fly into a furnace if they thought food was there.
“What are they?” I asked Gabe. I had seen the birds before but given them no thought.
Gabe said they were cormorants, which sounded exotic. Gabe told me they flew out over the lake in search of food each morning. At the end of the day they returned to nest in trees along the shore of the bay, facing the fires of the blast furnaces and mills. Neither scavengers like gulls nor beggars like geese nor timid souls like terns, the cormorants took charge of their lives. Out of sight of shore, they dove underwater and became submerged predators, swimming after their food like feathered barracudas. When their workday was over, they gathered with their buddies and flew home to snuggle on their perch and watch the sun go down. Blue-collar birds.
On summer mornings, I would step through the rear door of our house on the beach strip and into our garden and watch the cormorants fly east toward the sun, still hanging low over the water. The more I learned about the birds, the more I liked them. Cormorants work hard and mate for life. They’re not as pretty as swans, but not every man I slept with was Hugh Grant, either. They can dive into water cold as ice, they fly twenty miles back and forth to work each day, and they look good in black. To hell with swans. I’d rather be a cormorant.
Cormorants could not live anywhere else nearly as well as they do on the beach strip. Nor could I.
I needed Tina to understand this, but I never tried to explain it to her. The only blue collar Tina knows about is the one on her Chanel jacket. And the only birds she can identify are flamingos. Seen at a distance. From a yacht in the Caribbean.
HERE IS THE DIFFERENCE between Tina and me that you need to know: when we were kids, Tina wanted to grow up and marry a doctor, and she did; I wanted to grow up and become a doctor, and I didn’t.
When Tina announced that she had met the man she was going to marry, after their first date, Mother said, “Tell me about him.”
Tina met him while volunteering at a charity lunch in Toronto, probably raising money for underprivileged poodles or needy brain surgeons. She didn’t say, although she told me she had been wearing an absolutely stunning new Donna Karan suit and Anne Klein pumps that made her feel like Julia Roberts on a good day. Tina has always believed she resembles Julia Roberts, but only her mouth does. It’s her largest, most notable feature. A former boyfriend of hers told me that whenever he kissed Tina, he swore he heard an echo.
Anyway, Tina raved about her new man, who got his medical degree at Harvard, trained as a surgeon at McGill, was next in line to become head of surgery at Vancouver General, won a provincial junior tennis championship while an undergraduate, drove a silver BMW 535, had a mild case of eczema on his right elbow, and wore a size 42 Tall suit.
“And his name is?” Mother asked.
Tina said, “Andrew Golden.”
“Golden?” I said. “Is he Jewish?”
I might have asked if he wore boxers or briefs. Tina shrugged. “I guess so. Never asked.” A small thing like her future husband’s religion wasn’t important to her. Not as important as becoming the next head of surgery or driving a silver BMW. Over the years since, I have regretted not asking if Andrew wore boxers or briefs. I’ll bet Tina would have known.
So Tina married Andrew and I made it to pre-med before realizing that some dreams are better left that way. I dropped out after the first year. My marks were not good, and I was convinced they would not get better. While Tina pranced through college and Junior League, I worked at pharmacies, commercial art studios, food caterers and veterinary hospitals, always on the front desk, away from the action in the back rooms. I have a voice made for answering the telephone, I’ve been told, and a face for greeting men. Along the way, I developed a knack for bookkeeping. It’s my pension plan. Someday both the voice and the face will have faded, but as long as we pay taxes we’ll have tax collectors, and as long as we have tax collectors we’ll need bookkeepers.
TINA SAID NOTHING when she came into the house after Mel left. I told her I was going for a walk, and I spent the afternoon sitting on a bench facing the lake, waiting for the cormorants.
IT WAS ALMOST DINNERTIME when I returned home, walking through the garden and looking up at the bedroom window that Mel said the pervert might have watched from the garden shed. He would not have seen much. At forty, most women show as little flesh as possible, even to themselves, although I have managed to keep my body trim. I tend to stay away from windows and stay wrapped in silk robes. Still, I didn’t know what this season’s perversions were.
At a commercial art studio where I worked with a dozen other women, one of the artists would buy our old shoes from us, preferably high-heeled pumps. He preferred well-worn shoes and would almost salivate when we brought them in. We knew why he wanted them—he was a shoe pervert—we just didn’t know what he did with them or how he did it. Some of the women thought about it to the point where they refused to sell their shoes to him anymore. He almost cried over the vision of those smelly old shoes being tossed into the garbage. He looked so miserable that I felt sorry for him and sold him any old shoes I could find. I even sold him a few of my mother’s old shoes, although her feet were two sizes larger than mine. If he noticed, he never mentioned it. Sometimes I think perverts are the most misunderstood people in the world. Of course, I also think they should stay that way.
Tina was nibbling crackers and watching television in the living room. “We should go and visit Mother,” she said, keeping her eyes on the screen.
I said that was a good idea.
“Before or after dinner?” Tina asked.
I said after dinner was better, because then we wouldn’t be interrupted by Mother’s meal.
“Do you want to eat out or make dinner here?” she said.
I said I didn’t feel like cooking, but could make us sandwiches if that’s what she wanted. Tina’s questions, I knew, were stepping stones to the real goal, which we finally reached when she said, “What’s he like?” She still hadn’t looked directly at me.
“What’s who like?” Of course I knew.
“Your friend Mel.”
“You saw him. You talked to him.”
“I mean, what’s he like in bed?” This time she turned her head to stare at me.
“Go to hell.”
“Did your husband know?”
“There was nothing to know.”
“Yes, there was. He knew, didn’t he? He took the gun with him to the blanket because he knew, and maybe he was going to kill you and then himself, or maybe he just wanted to hear all the details, because that’s what men do. They torture themselves with the details. When you didn’t show up, he shot himself. Isn’t that what the police think?”
“Did Mel say that?”
She looked away, then back at me. “Come on, Josie. A blind woman could figure out you two had something going.”
“Tina, whether he and I …” I began to speak to her through clenched teeth and hated the sound of my own voice, so I started over. “Whether or not Mel and I had something going, as you put it so poetically, Gabe … Gabe knew nothing about it and even if he did, Gabe …” I kept stumbling over his name. “Gabe would never do what you said he might have done, okay?”
Tina actually smiled at that. “That’s what Mel said. He told me that even he was finding it hard to believe that Gabe would kill himself. He said he’s beginning to think somebody else killed Gabe with his own gun, and maybe the police should start investigating it as a murder. Just like you’ve been saying all along.” She stood up and walked past me toward the front door. “Close your mouth,” she said, like Mother used to say when we were kids, “or you’ll catch flies. And I don’t want a sandwich. I want a real meal.”
WE ATE AT A RESTAURANT ALONG THE LAKE, one of those places where they serve drinks in old preserves jars and the menu looks like a page from the Sunday comics. But the salads were edible and the view over the water was attractive. We watched sailboats skim across the lake, their sails and spinnakers shining against the low light of the setting sun. I have never liked sailing. Too much work and seasickness. But I have always liked the idea of sailing, the way I have always liked the idea of travelling to other planets. I think it’s a wonderful idea. Just don’t invite me to join in.
“Look,” Tina said when our food arrived, “I’m not going to ask what you and Mel were up to—”
“Good,” I said. “Because I would tell you to mind your own business.”
“He seems to be a nice guy. And he cares about you. I could see that.” She was picking at her food, grilled chicken over Caesar salad. “And he’s cute. Younger than you, too.”
“You jealous?”
“Damn right.” She patted her mouth with her napkin. “I’ve always been jealous of you. I used to tell myself that you got the body and I got the brains, but that doesn’t work anymore, either.”
“Well, you got the money, anyway.”
She looked across the water. “I take consolation in that. Did I tell you that Andrew and I have booked a cruise to Hawaii for Thanksgiving? We have a suite with a private balcony. Should be fun. Andrew wants to spend Christmas there, too.”
“I’m pleased for you, Tina. I really am.”
Tina poked at her salad as though a mouse might be hiding in it, then asked, “Do you think I lead a shallow life?”
“Does it matter?”
“That I lead a shallow life?”
“No, if I think you do. I don’t worry about your opinion of my life, Tina. Each of us is responsible for her own happiness, right?”
“That’s what Daddy used to say.” She smiled and looked down at her lap.
I have an opinion of forty-four-year-old women who still call their fathers Daddy. “He used to say a lot of things, most of them true.”
She nodded. “Do you think Mother still misses him?”
“I think,” I said, “that after all these years, she misses not being able to speak more than she misses our father.”
I pushed my plate away, and both of us sat in silence until Tina began talking about Mel again.
“He’s worried about you, did I say that? Mel, I mean. He’s really concerned about this guy who was in the garden shed, watching you.”
“Or watching Gabe.”
Tina blinked. “Why would he be watching Gabe?”
“For god’s sake, Tina, they can get married now.”
Tina said, “Oh.” Then, “Anyway, Mel was telling me that he’s checking the records for confirmed perverts who live on the beach strip. You know, people who’ve been convicted of doing what this guy was doing, and other stuff. So far he’s come up with over a dozen. Listen, there can’t be more than eight hundred, a thousand people living there, and at least a dozen are convicted perverts. Now you’re all alone and—”
“I’ll buy a big dog.”
Tina returned to her food. “Maybe you should just start getting a little more friendly with Mel again.” She looked up, saw the expression on my face, and said, “I mean, when all of this is over, of course. This stuff with your husband. You know, maybe six months, a year from now. Damn.” She put her hand on mine and looked away, embarrassed.
WE SAT WITH MOTHER FOR AN HOUR, Tina and I answering questions she wrote in her lovely cursive penmanship on the blackboard. Did Gabe shoot himself? she wanted to know, and I said, “Absolutely not.”
“She’s either crying or making wisecracks,” Tina told Mother about me, and Mother smiled and wrote, As long as she’s making jokes, she’s okay. That’s one reason I love my mother: she knows me better than anyone else.
When we ran out of things to say and write, Tina and I remained to watch television with her. After suffering her stroke, whenever Mother tried to speak and could not she would cry. This lasted a couple of months. Mother did not stop trying to speak, but she stopped crying over it. Instead, she would get angry at the words she formed but could not deliver. She would make a fist, bringing it down on her knee or on the table, if she were sitting at one, then stare into space, biting her lip. I loved her for that. I loved her for getting angry at the unfairness of life. It proved what I have known all my life, that I am my mother’s child, and maybe Tina is the adopted one.
Mother did not become angry this time. She looked from Tina to me and back again, as though trying to choose between us. Or, and this chilled me, trying to remember exactly who we were and why we were in her room.
When we left, Tina hugged her briefly. I held on to her longer. Then I leaned back to look into her eyes. “Are you all right?” I asked her.
She frowned, pointed at her lips, and shook her head.
“I know you can’t speak,” I said. “But you know us, right? Tina and me?”
She nodded, then pulled me to her again.
“HOW LONG DO YOU THINK MOTHER HAS?” Tina asked on the way back to my house.
I was driving. “Until what?”
“Until the next stroke, the one that’ll kill her.”
“Jesus, Tina.”
“Don’t get angry with me. It’s a legitimate question. Andrew told me that when someone Mother’s age has a stroke like that, she’ll have another, and we had better expect it. The difference between you and me is that I’m a realist and you’re a dreamer.”
“Yeah, well, the reality is that my husband’s dead and yours isn’t.”
“Which reminds me. I should call Andrew.”
She pulled the smallest cell phone I had ever seen out of her purse and dialed it, right there in the car. “Got his voice mail,” she said. We were crossing the lift bridge over the canal, the tires growling against the textured steel road surface. When we were children, crossing the bridge in Dad’s car, he would tell us a troll lived under the bridge, and the troll grew angry whenever anyone drove over him, and it was the troll we heard growling, not our tires on the rough steel. I smiled at the memory and would have mentioned it to Tina, something we could share between us, but she was continuing her extended conversation with her absent husband.
“… know you’re busy, but I want you to look at that dining-room suite I mentioned at Dorsey’s. I left you a note on it—did you get the note? Stop in on your way home from the hospital tonight. I think we should have it for Thanksgiving, but it may be a special order, so we should do something about it now, all right? Josie says hello. She’s driving, or I would hand her the telephone. She’s bearing up so well, the sweetheart, and I’ll give her your love. Call me when you get time, and speak to the landscapers, will you? They still haven’t trimmed the hedge at the back the way I like it. You’re going to have to give them hell, Andrew. You’re too nice to them. I think we should change them, the maintenance people, I mean.”
She pecked a few kisses into the telephone and snapped it shut just as we pulled into the driveway. I switched off the engine and lights and sat staring at the darkened house and the eastern sky behind it, over the lake. The high clouds were lit in that dying pink shade of summer dusk.
Tina spoke my name twice before I looked at her.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“About what?”
“About …” She waved at the house. “This. Your life. You stayed home while Gabe worked, right? Except for afternoons doing the books where Mother lives?”
“That’s how Gabe wanted it,” I said. I stepped out of the car and walked toward the house, Tina trailing me. “And so did I. We paid cash for the house—”
“It didn’t take that much money. Real estate prices here are cheap. You can probably buy our house for the same price you’d pay for a parking spot in Vancouver.”
I unlocked the front door, tossed the keys on a table, and turned to face Tina.
“Why didn’t Gabe want you to work?” Tina asked. “At a full-time job?”
I didn’t like her tone. “Hey, I didn’t want to work either. Not full-time. I’d been fired from my job just after we moved here—”
“Is that when you worked at the veterinarian’s?”
“As a matter of fact—”
“And you told some woman who brought her little dog into the animal hospital that the dumbest bitch in the room wasn’t the one with four legs and an infected paw but the one wearing the cheap dress and the dumb hairdo?” She’d always enjoyed telling that story. I’d assumed she was proud of her little sister’s wit. Now I thought it was something else, and it made me angry.
“What the hell, Tina?” I said. “You haven’t worked a day since you married Andrew, you tramp.”
“Of course not!” she shouted. “Unlike you, I have social commitments.” That almost inspired me to pour turpentine into her underwear again, this time while she was wearing it, but just then the telephone rang. I seized it as an opportunity to end the battle, or maybe as a weapon, and barked, “Hello!”
“Josie?” It was Dewey. “Should I call some other time?”
“Yes,” I said, then “No,” because this seemed like a good way for Tina and I to stop arguing gracefully. “Hi, Dewey,” I said and looked across at Tina, who mouthed “Dewey?”
“I’ve been reading about Gabe and you in the papers,” Dewey said, “and feeling terrible, but I didn’t want to make a pest of myself, you know, unless you wanted to see me.”
I thanked Dewey and said I would love to see him, I needed all the friends I could get, and asked him to call me next week. He promised he would, we said our goodbyes, and I hung up and turned to face Tina, both of us calm.
“Dewey?” Tina said, aloud this time. “As in Huey, Louie and?”
“He’s a friend from way back,” I said.
“How far back?”
“Before Gabe.”
“And now he thinks the coast is clear?”
“There’s nothing romantic about it,” I said. “I haven’t seen him since Gabe and I were married. Now give me a hug, shut up for five minutes, and I’ll tell you about him. If you’re interested.”
Tina lowered her head, looked at me with a smirk, and said she was interested in any man who had known me for years, who wasn’t a gnome, and who had never parked his shoes under my bed. Then she opened her arms and we hugged and patted each other’s back. What would I do without the little snip?
I explained that I had met Dewey while I was working at the veterinarian’s. His business name, Dewey Does Dogs, was the least attractive thing about him. All day long, while he washed and clipped and manicured hairy little creatures, his stereo belted out Mozart and Beethoven or Renée Fleming and Maria Callas. At the end of the day, when the dog owners had rescued their little sweetums and paid Dewey, he pocketed a couple of hundred dollars and smelled like a cocker spaniel.
“That’s two things I can imagine you not liking about him,” Tina said. “His name and his aroma.”
“There’s more,” I said. “He’s bisexual.”
“I hear it doubles your chances of getting a date on Saturday night.”
“What,” I said, “were we talking about before we started fighting?” I didn’t want to talk about Dewey. I wanted only to think about Gabe. I wanted to wallow in the memories of him. And I wanted Tina’s shoulder to cry on when I needed it.
“We were talking about your finances,” she said. “Unless you’ve got a big stash of money hidden away somewhere, or Gabe qualifies for a bank president’s pension … I mean, what are you going to live on? You’ll need to get a real job.”
“A real job?” She might have said I needed to buy a camel.
“Do you have any savings?”
“Like I said, the house is paid for. I guess there’ll be pension money …”
“So, what are you going to do, even if there is? Sit here the rest of your life, looking out at the lake?”
It was a classic big sister question. One I hadn’t thought of. Now that Tina had spoken it aloud, I chose to answer it aloud, and I answered it with the reply I had kept hidden since talking with Mel that morning. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think I will. I think I’ll sit here and stare at the lake, and when I get tired of doing that, I’ll look for whoever killed Gabe. I’ll look for the rest of my life, if I have to.”