Runaway (22 page)

“I don’t have one.”

“Oh, Mavis,” said Mrs. Travers. And Mr. Travers said, “Come on, Mavis. Any old word will do.”

“But I don’t have any old word. I’m so sorry. I just feel stupid tonight. The rest of you just play around me.”

Which they did, everybody pretending nothing was wrong, while Mavis smoked and continued to smile her determined, sweetly hurt, unhappy smile. In a little while she got up and said she was awfully tired, and she couldn’t leave her children on their grandparents’ hands any longer, she’d had a lovely and instructive visit, and she must now go home.

“I have to give you an Oxford dictionary next Christmas,” she said to nobody in particular as she went out with a bitter tinkle of a laugh.

The Traverses’ dictionary that Wat had used was an American one.

When she was gone none of them looked at each other. Mrs. Travers said, “Gretchen, do you have the strength to make us all a pot of coffee?” And Gretchen went off to the kitchen, muttering, “What fun. Jesus wept.”

“Well. Her life is trying,” said Mrs. Travers. “With the two little ones.”

During the week Grace got a break, for one day, between clearing breakfast and setting up dinner, and when Mrs. Travers found out about this she started driving up to Bailey’s Falls to bring her down to the lake for those free hours. Maury would be at work then—he was working for the summer with the road gang repairing Highway 7—and Wat would be in his office in Ottawa and Gretchen would be swimming with the children or rowing with them on the lake. Usually Mrs. Travers herself would announce that she had shopping to do, or preparations to make for supper, or letters to write, and she would leave Grace on her own in the big, cool, shaded living-dining room, with its permanently dented leather sofa and crowded bookshelves.

“Read anything that takes your fancy,” Mrs. Travers said. “Or curl up and go to sleep if that’s what you’d like. It’s a hard job, you must be tired. I’ll make sure you’re back on time.”

Grace never slept. She read. She barely moved, and below her shorts her bare legs became sweaty and stuck to the leather. Perhaps it was because of the intense pleasure of reading. Quite often she saw nothing of Mrs. Travers until it was time for her to be driven back to work.

Mrs. Travers would not start any sort of conversation until enough time had passed for Grace’s thoughts to have got loose from whatever book she had been in. Then she might mention having read it herself, and say what she had thought of it—but always in a way that was both thoughtful and lighthearted. For instance she said, about
Anna Karenina
, “I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, but I know that first I identified with Kitty, and then it was Anna—oh, it was awful, with Anna, and
now, you know, the last time I found myself sympathizing all the time with Dolly. Dolly when she goes to the country, you know, with all those children, and she has to figure out how to do the washing, there’s the problem about the washtubs—I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs. Don’t pay any attention to me, anyway. You don’t, do you?”

“I don’t know if I pay much attention to anybody.” Grace was surprised at herself and wondered if she sounded conceited or juvenile. “But I like listening to you talk.”

Mrs. Travers laughed. “I like listening to myself.”

Somehow, around this time, Maury had begun to talk about their being married. This would not happen for quite a while—not until after he was qualified and working as an engineer—but he spoke of it as of something that she as well as he must be taking for granted.
When we are married
, he would say, and instead of questioning or contradicting him, Grace would listen curiously.

When they were married they would have a place on Little Sabot Lake. Not too close to his parents, not too far away. It would be just a summer place, of course. The rest of the time they would live wherever his work as an engineer should take them. That might be anywhere—Peru, Iraq, the Northwest Territories. Grace was delighted by the idea of such travels—rather more than she was delighted by the idea of what he spoke of, with a severe pride, as
our own home
. None of this seemed at all real to her, but then, the idea of helping her uncle, of taking on the life of a chair caner, in the town and the very house where she had grown up, had never seemed real either.

Maury kept asking her what she had told her aunt and uncle about him, when she was going to take him home to meet them.
Even his easy use of that word—
home
—seemed slightly off kilter to her, though surely it was one she herself had used. It seemed more fitting to say
my aunt and uncle’s house
.

In fact she had said nothing in her brief weekly letters, except to mention that she was “going out with a boy who works around here for the summer.” She might have given the impression that he worked at the hotel.

It wasn’t as if she had never thought of getting married. That possibility—half a certainty—had been in her thoughts, along with the life of caning chairs. In spite of the fact that nobody had ever courted her, she had thought that it would happen, someday, and in exactly this way, with the man making up his mind immediately. He would see her—perhaps he would have brought a chair to be fixed—and seeing her, he would fall in love. He would be handsome, like Maury. Passionate, like Maury. Pleasurable physical intimacies would follow.

This was the thing that had not happened. In Maury’s car, or out on the grass under the stars, she was willing. And Maury was ready, but not willing. He felt it his responsibility to protect her. And the ease with which she offered herself threw him off balance. He sensed, perhaps, that it was cold. A deliberate offering which he could not understand and which did not fit in at all with his notions of her. She herself did not understand how cold she was—she believed that her show of eagerness must be leading to the pleasures she knew about, in solitude and imagining, and she felt it was up to Maury to take over. Which he would not do.

These sieges left them both disturbed and slightly angry or ashamed, so that they could not stop kissing, clinging, using fond words, to make it up to each other as they said good night. It was a relief to Grace to be alone, to get into bed in the dormitory and blot the last couple of hours out of her mind. And she thought it must be a relief to Maury to be driving down the
highway by himself, rearranging his impressions of his Grace so that he could stay wholeheartedly in love with her.

Most of the waitresses left after Labour Day to go back to school or college. But the hotel was staying open till Thanksgiving with a reduced staff—Grace among them. There was talk, this year, about opening again in early December for a winter season, or at least a Christmas season, but nobody amongst the kitchen or dining-room staff seemed to know if this would really happen. Grace wrote to her aunt and uncle as if the Christmas season was a certainty. In fact she did not mention any closing at all, unless possibly after New Year’s. So they should not expect her.

Why did she do this? It was not as if she had any other plans. She had told Maury that she thought she should spend this one year helping her uncle, maybe trying to find somebody else to learn caning, while he, Maury, was taking his final year at university. She had even promised to have him visit at Christmas so that he could meet her family. And he had said that Christmas would be a good time to make their engagement formal. He was saving from his summer wages to buy her a diamond ring.

She too had been saving her wages. So she would be able to take the bus to Kingston, to visit him during his school term.

She spoke of this, promised it, so easily. But did she believe, or even wish, that it would happen?

“Maury is a sterling character,” said Mrs. Travers. “Well, you can see that for yourself. He will be a dear uncomplicated man, like his father. Not like his brother. His brother Neil is very bright. I don’t mean that Maury isn’t, you certainly don’t get to be an engineer without a brain or two in your head, but Neil is—he’s deep.” She laughed at herself. “
Deep unfathomable caves of ocean bear
—what am I talking about? A long time Neil
and I didn’t have anybody but each other. So I think he’s special. I don’t mean he can’t be fun. But sometimes people who are the most fun can be melancholy, can’t they? You wonder about them. But what’s the use of worrying about your grown-up children? With Neil I worry a bit, with Maury only a tiny little bit. And Gretchen I don’t worry about at all. Because women always have got something, haven’t they, to keep them going? That men haven’t got.”

The house on the lake was never closed up till Thanksgiving. Gretchen and the children had to go back to Ottawa, of course, because of school. And Maury, whose job was finished, had to go to Kingston. Mr. Travers would come out only on weekends. But usually, Mrs. Travers had told Grace, she stayed on, sometimes with guests, sometimes by herself.

Then her plans were changed. She went back to Ottawa with Mr. Travers in September. This happened unexpectedly—the weekend dinner was cancelled.

Maury said that she got into trouble, now and then, with her nerves. “She has to have a rest,” he said. “She has to go into the hospital for a couple of weeks or so and they get her stabilized. She always comes out fine.”

Grace said that his mother was the last person she would have expected to have such troubles.

“What brings it on?”

“I don’t think they know,” Maury said.

But after a moment he said, “Well. It could be her husband. I mean, her first husband. Neil’s father. What happened with him, et cetera.”

What had happened was that Neil’s father had killed himself.

“He was unstable, I guess.

“But it maybe isn’t that,” he continued. “It could be other
stuff. Problems women have around her age. It’s okay though—they can get her straightened around easy now, with drugs. They’ve got terrific drugs. Not to worry about it.”

By Thanksgiving, as Maury had predicted, Mrs. Travers was out of the hospital and feeling well. Thanksgiving dinner was taking place at the lake as usual. And it was being held on Sunday—that was also as usual, to allow for packing up and closing the house on Monday. And it was fortunate for Grace, because Sunday had remained her day off.

The whole family would be there. No guests—unless you counted Grace. Neil and Mavis and their children would be staying at Mavis’ parents’ place, and having dinner there on Monday, but they would be spending Sunday at the Traverses’.

By the time Maury brought Grace down to the lake on Sunday morning, the turkey was already in the oven. Because of the children, dinner would be early, around five o’clock. The pies were on the kitchen counter—pumpkin, apple, wild blueberry. Gretchen was in charge of the kitchen—as coordinated a cook as she was an athlete. Mrs. Travers sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and working at a jigsaw puzzle with Gretchen’s younger daughter, Dana.

“Ah, Grace,” she said, jumping up for an embrace—the first time she had ever done this—and with a clumsy motion of her hand scattering the jigsaw pieces.

Dana wailed, “
Grandma
,” and her older sister, Janey, who had been watching critically, scooped up the pieces.

“We can put them back together,” she said. “Grandma didn’t mean to.”

“Where do you keep the cranberry sauce?” said Gretchen.

“In the cupboard,” said Mrs. Travers, still squeezing Grace’s arms and ignoring the destroyed puzzle.

“
Where
in the cupboard?”

“Oh. Cranberry sauce,” Mrs. Travers said. “Well—I make it. First I put the cranberries in a little water. Then I keep it on low heat—no, I think I soak them first—”

“Well, I haven’t got time for all that,” Gretchen said. “You mean you don’t have any canned?”

“I guess not. I must not have, because I make it.”

“I’ll have to send somebody to get some.”

“Maybe you could ask Mrs. Woods?”

“No. I’ve hardly even spoken to her. I haven’t got the nerve. Somebody’ll have to go to the store.”

“Dear—it’s Thanksgiving,” said Mrs. Travers gently. “Nowhere will be open.”

“That place down the highway, it’s always open.” Gretchen raised her voice. “Where’s Wat?”

“He’s out in the rowboat,” called Mavis from the back bedroom. She made it sound like a warning, because she was trying to get her baby to sleep. “He took Mikey out in the boat.”

Mavis had driven over in her own car with Mikey and the baby. Neil was coming later—he had some phone calls to make.

And Mr. Travers had gone golfing.

“It’s just that I need somebody to go to the store,” Gretchen said. She waited, but no offer came from the bedroom. She raised her eyebrows at Grace.

“You can’t drive, can you?”

Grace said no.

Mrs. Travers looked around to see where her chair was, and sat down, with a grateful sigh.

“Well,” said Gretchen. “Maury can drive. Where’s Maury?”

Maury was in the front bedroom looking for his swimming trunks, though everybody had told him that the water would be too cold for swimming. He said the store would not be open.

“It will be,” said Gretchen. “They sell gas. And if it isn’t
there’s that one just coming into Perth, you know, with the ice-cream cones—”

Maury wanted Grace to come with him, but the two little girls, Janey and Dana, were pulling her to come with them to see the swing their grandfather had put up under the Norway maple at the side of the house.

Going down the steps, she felt the strap of one of her sandals break. She took both shoes off and walked without difficulty on the sandy soil, the flat-pressed plantain, and the many curled leaves that had already fallen.

First she pushed the children in the swing, then they pushed her. It was when she jumped off, barefoot, that one leg crumpled and she let out a yelp of pain, not knowing what had happened.

It was her foot, not her leg. The pain had shot up from the sole of her left foot, which had been cut by the sharp edge of a clamshell.

“Dana brought those shells,” Janey said. “She was going to make a house for her snail.”