ON EITHER side of the six steps that led to our front door, two lilac bushes exploded into fragrant blossom every spring. The bushes were so wide and tall we called them trees. In late May the branches bowed low, and the blossoms brushed across your hair when you walked beneath them. If you were the romantic kind, like some of my brother’s girlfriends, their scent could make you swoon. Even strangers passing by stopped to admire the lilacs. Sometimes they knocked on our door to ask if they could pick them. Mom always went out with a knife Dad kept sharpened for that purpose and cut a huge bouquet.
The opposite of frugality, the lilacs made us special; they hid the poverty of the house, the messy yard, the worry that lived inside the walls. My mother could give and give; her natural generosity had a chance to show itself. I couldn’t walk by the bushes without burying my face in the purple flowers and inhaling deeply, taking in with the scent my mother’s pleasure, her small pride in being able to bestow on whoever asked such a lush and momentary beauty.
In many family photographs, my brother and I stand in front of the lilacs. There’s one of him at around thirteen with his first new baseball glove, me small beside him, my skinny legs bare. There’s another of him posing in the spiffy pants and shirt he wore to his grade 8 graduation, and one of me seven years later for the same occasion in a blue dress my grandmother Ford had sewn. I hated that dress. Though my grandmother was an expert seamstress, the sleeves didn’t lie flat at the shoulders, and she’d bought enough material to sew exactly the same dress for my two younger cousins, who were only in grades 6 and 7. My mother always said Grandma liked them better than she liked me, and this seemed the proof.
Twice, I posed as a flower girl in front of the lilacs. The first time, at five, I wore a diaphanous yellow, the colour of a cabbage butterfly. After Mom snapped the picture, I ran to the backyard and pumped myself high on the swing, feeling light and lovely in the skirt that puffed out from my legs, then flattened, puffed out and flattened again. From the porch next door, Ona called me over. I skipped towards her, thinking she wanted a better look at how pretty I was. When I got close, she stepped outside and hit me on the head with a piece of firewood. “You think you’re so great,” she said, and banged the door shut.
I ran home crying, not sure what had happened, my hand on my head, my fingers sticky with blood from the scrape. In the kitchen, my mother got me out of the yellow dress then pulled the kitchen table over to the sink. She lifted me up and laid me on my back so she could wash my hair, careful with the sore spot. “You’ll feel pretty again,” she said. “Wait till you get to wear your headband of flowers.” They weren’t real flowers like the lilacs, but made of some kind of satiny material, flat and overlapping as if they’d been pressed inside a book. As soon I donned the headband, my head stopped hurting. Besides, I knew I’d gone far enough with self-pity. My mother’s “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about” was something I heard too often to keep snivelling for long.
The bride, Doris, who’d chosen me for her flower girl, was one of the three Andrews sisters who rented the upstairs rooms in our house, with their mother. They came in from their farm in late fall and stayed through the winter. Their brother remained in the old house on the land. He seeded the crops and drove the combine during the harvest, though Dad said the sisters worked like men on the farm, raising pigs and calves, fixing barbed-wire fences and driving the grain truck in the fields to catch the wheat streaming from the hopper. I looked forward to their move to our house every year. More often than not, it was the first snow that announced their arrival. In the spring, their return to the country coincided with the delivery to our front door of a box of downy yellow chicks. Until the Andrews left a few days later, they kept the chicks upstairs under a low light bulb they’d rigged up. I’d dip my hands into the warm, soft pool and scoop one out to hold in my palm. It was like a small ball of sunshine that had sprouted feathers.
With the Brownie box camera Mom had acquired by saving coupons from Nabob tea, she took a picture of Doris in her white bridal gown in front of the lilacs. Two years later I wore blue taffeta as a flower girl for her sister, Myrtle. The dress came with a blue, three-layered crinoline that I would later wear when I twirled like a ballerina on the linoleum in front of our couch. Different blooms on the same bushes beautified the backdrop in the two pictures, which Mom hung on the wall of her bedroom. Seeing the lilacs behind and above me made my nostrils flare every time I looked at the black-and-white photos in their wooden frames.
The two Andrews sisters were in their forties when they became brides, and no one had expected them to get married. Their older sister, Winnie, never did. I liked her the best, but my favourite of the Andrews was their mother, whom I called Grandma. In the morning, when I’d hear footsteps creak on the ceiling above my cot in the corner of my parents’ room, I’d sneak upstairs in my flannelette pyjamas, knock on Grandma’s bedroom door and be invited in. I’d climb beside her under the covers, and Winnie would bring both of us a cup of tea. Sometimes as a treat I’d get a piece of toast spread with jam. Grandma showed me how to roll it up, then dunk the end into the tea before taking a bite. It was a most elegant breakfast; I felt ladylike beside her. Grandma spoke with an English accent, and we always had matching saucers for our cups.
Mom worried that I was bugging the Andrews, and she told them to let her know if I was getting underfoot. I learned on my own to judge if I wasn’t welcome. There was never a problem with Winnie, who was the least fussy of the sisters and the handiest on the farm. Mom said Winnie could throw a steer for branding without her brother’s help. Doris would sometimes pinch her lips when she saw me about to walk into their hallway. Myrtle might go about her business and refuse to meet my eye. When either thing happened, I’d pretend I was there to use the toilet to the left of the stairs; it was the only one in the house.
Some evenings I’d go back upstairs, in my pyjamas again, and sit on Grandma’s bed. She’d never turn me out. Every night, in a long white nightgown, she sat in front of her mirror on the stool that slid from the space in between the two pedestals of her dresser. She’d remove the bobby pins, one by one, from the bun coiled at the back of her neck and put them in a little porcelain box with a gold scroll around the rim and a red rose flaring in the centre. I loved the bobby pins. How gentle and thoughtful was the man who invented them: he’d rounded the metal tips with bulbs of plastic so they wouldn’t scratch Grandma’s head. Her hair spilled over her shoulders like the wisps of snow the wind blew across the roads in winter.
I dangled my feet over the edge of her bed as I watched Grandma brush her hair. The back of the brush was ivory, a white glow with a haze of yellow in it as if it had been polished by my dad’s fingers, the ones he used to hold a cigarette. I couldn’t believe how dazzling her hair was and didn’t understand why she tucked it away every morning. When she put the brush down, I jumped off the bed and watched her climb under the covers. Her hair fanned out on the pillow, her face framed in its silky white. “Sleep tight, little girl,” she’d say. That was my signal to reply, “Don’t let the bed bugs bite,” then slip from her room, close her door and go down to my own small bed. Sometimes I’d slide down the banister, the quietest way to descend, as if I were a burglar and had stolen something precious from the upstairs rooms.
Ona and Lynda didn’t understand how it was possible for me to have three grandmothers. I felt lucky, especially as Grandma Andrews was by far the best of them. There were no bad stories about her like the ones I overheard my parents tell about Grandma Ford and Grandma Crozier. She’d never sent any of her children away or disinherited them. And if she had sewn my grade 8 graduation dress, I knew it would have been just for me. She wouldn’t have made copies for my cousins.
On her daughters’ wedding days, Grandma Andrews posed in front of the lilacs too. In both photos, she wore the same plain dress with buttons up the front, a thin belt, lisle stockings and black, laced-up shoes with a short heel. Her hair disappeared into her usual bun, above which perched a little black hat that looked like a conductor’s except for the veil that puffed from the back. I liked to think of her calling, “All aboard,” and I’d jump on the train beside her.
Grandma died three years after she and Winnie stopped renting our upstairs rooms. Mom said I was too young to attend her funeral. Pushing myself back and forth on the swing when all the adults were in church, I wondered if Winnie had brushed her mother’s hair and spread it on a satin pillow. I wished I could have placed her bobby pins in their small box beside her in the coffin and blessed her with a handful of lilacs. I’d have shaken a bouquet over her head and down the length of her, the way a priest shakes his censer to sprinkle holy water. She’d have carried the insistent fragrance and tiny black seeds with her no matter how far she had to travel. Around her sleeping body, they’d have cast their lilac spell in the darkest tunnels of the earth.