Penelope seldom goes into Matt’s room anymore. It isn’t respect for his privacy — though that was once an issue, God knows — or a fear of ghosts. She has simply gotten out of the habit. It is a big house. You didn’t need to go into every room every day. And once you stopped, it became normal not to think about some of them. The bathrooms were the easiest to forget, and the most rewarding. Who needed to clean three toilets when there was only one set of buttocks in the house? The place has effectively shrunk to four rooms: her bed, her bath, the kitchen, and that room with the wood stove and her wingback chair.
When Matt announced he was coming to stay (had he phoned or written?), she had immediately written herself a note. She writes a lot of notes these days, sometimes notes about checking the other notes. “Matt’s sheets,” this one says. What about them? she wonders. Presumably, she had wanted them to be fresh. The problem now is determining beyond any doubt that they are. Because doubt is a problem these days. There are sheets on the bed. Have they been there since his last visit, whenever that was? If so, dirty or clean? She used to wash sheets as soon as visitors were out the door, but that may have stopped. She thinks it has. Has she read the note before — it looks familiar, but then she uses the same pad of paper for all her notes — and already changed the sheets? She doesn’t mind running them through the machine again, but she doesn’t want to be doing that time after time forever and ever. Perhaps if she washes and dries them and leaves them folded on top of the quilt for Matt to make up for himself … Or she could make up the bed and attach a note. Destroying the original note once that’s done would also be a good idea.
She stoops to sniff at the sheets. If they smell of lemons (or is it lavender in her detergent now?) they are probably fresh. Unless Matt wears scent to bed. Or that wife of his. Penelope wonders whether she was here on Matt’s last visit but can’t picture her. It’s natural for daughters-in-law to be uncomfortable around mothers-in-law, but she can’t recall many occasions when the girl has even given herself that opportunity. She herself was spared the experience of a mother-in-law, but Thora had some stories of her first few years of marriage. Penelope was too young when her grandmother died to remember much of anything about her, let alone recall witnessing the strife between her and Thora. All she had in place of memories of her own were Thora’s horror stories of her in-laws. Her father would never have been able to produce competing stories about his in-laws. Thora appeared to have sprung from the earth. That’s what people used to say. Sometimes it was with admiration.
Of course, everyone knew that Thora had come not from the earth but from Norway, which was almost as mythic. Many of the details were not for public consumption, but Penelope learned to repeat her mother’s story at a very early age.
Mamma sailed from Bergen with about a hundred other Norwegian girls who were answering an advertisement for sardine packers at a new plant about to open in Canada. Weren’t you frightened coming all that way by yourself? Penelope always asked this even though she knew the answer. It was a way of keeping the story fresh. No, Mamma wasn’t frightened. She had travelled with her brother Nils. Mamma’s parents were apparently very strict and would never have allowed her to travel without a chaperone. The young Penelope loved that word chaperone. It sounded so worldly, so sophisticated, which helped cancel out the sardine-packing part of the history. She quickly learned not to ask about brother Nils. He vanished from the story not long after they arrived. The sardine part actually cancelled itself out pretty quickly too as the saga followed Mamma through the founding of Handworks — it was called something else at first — and then, four or five years later, with the marriage to one of her new town’s princes (this was Penelope’s father, whom she could barely remember). The story always concluded — if it didn’t end — with the birth of Princess Penelope. That was her favourite part.
She imagines her mother, an immigrant, cast among the descendants of the town’s Loyalists (themselves immigrants, though they never would admit to that), and can’t decide whether that would have been harder or easier than breaking into the society of the summer people, who had only recently begun to build their shingled palaces. Penelope’s experience had been that the summer-people nut was the harder one to crack, but then, of course, thanks to her father, she had Loyalist blood in her veins, and that bought her a little access to the townspeople, regardless of how some continued to see her mother.
The country women — the ones who knitted and wove and hooked and felted for her — loved Thora. There was no question of that. The enterprise they called her smokeless factory had seen them through many hard times when the crops were bad (most years) or the price for pork dropped or the herring stopped running or there were no boats to build or summer people to hire their families on as help. After she took over the business from Thora, Penelope was never sure whether the women loved her for herself or because she was Thora’s daughter. In the end, it didn’t really matter. She had taken the business that her mother had founded and run for thirty years, and she had kept it going for a further forty. That was a lot harder to do in the last forty than in the first thirty, she thinks.
She is glad Matt had those early years with his grandmother. Glad too that she had Thora to help her raise him through his first decade. People, usually summer people — summer women — often made a fuss over how remarkable it was that Penelope could both run the business and raise a child by herself. She usually smiled and nodded and said, You do what you have to. Almost never did she give any of the credit to her mother. She doesn’t feel guilty about this. They had agreed that if the myth of the single mother helped sales — and it did — then there was no harm in it. In private, Penelope showed her mother how grateful she was every day. She thinks she did. Hopes she did.
She looks at the clutter of objects on the shelf above Matt’s desk. He was always untidy after Thora died. She supposes he was untidy before, and that Thora simply kept him in line. There are commemorative Coke cans (what an idea), a menagerie of impossible pottery animals, an RAF epaulette he found somewhere, and a battered tin cup brimming with defunct ballpoint pens. She knows they are defunct because she has tried every one of them but has not had the heart to throw them out.
She must get at it, she thinks, must gather these things up for the scrap drive. The cans and the tin cup can be melted down, the epaulette sorted with other unused woolens lying about the house and bagged. She is not sure whether the war effort has any use for pottery animals, whole or broken. Perhaps they could go with the bones she has been saving. They say they make them into glue for building airplanes to fight the Nazis.
Something about airplanes. Matt is coming home. He should have clean sheets. She gets up off the bed (when did she sit down?) and begins stripping it. She will have to hurry. Her watch says it is two o’clock. Why, then, is it pitch black outside?