A Good House (16 page)

Without being asked, Sally had decided that while they were at the lake she would take on the job of keeping Neil and Krissy entertained. It was obvious to everyone that she had set herself this responsibility. She spent most of the time rolling around on the floor with them or flopped in the hammock or down at the edge of the water digging in the fine, clean sand with old serving spoons, filling brightly painted sand pails to build castles for them, pulling them back out of the water when they crawled or toddled too far away. She got them to help her collect unusual stones and pebbles along the water's edge, tried to make them understand exactly why the stones were nice. Her arms were so small it was hard for her to lift or carry the kids, so the others watched her at a confident distance and intervened once in a while when it was necessary. But they did so quietly and quickly, as if it were hardly necessary at all.

Because Sally was so helpful, Andy spent a lot of time on the porch couch reading first
Crime and Punishment
and then
The Feminine Mystique.
She drank a lot of juice, watched small boats pull skiers back and forth, watched the waves roll in. One afternoon she called Margaret out to see a bunch of kids, they would have been eighteen or nineteen, horsing around in the lake. Margaret said she'd heard their antics from the kitchen. Two of the guys were diving and then blasting up under their squealing, laughing girlfriends, between their legs, lifting them up out of the water and tossing them backwards. The third guy was dunking his girlfriend's head, holding her under with both hands, letting her up and holding her under again. She fought it, she flailed and thrashed, but the more she fought, the harder he pushed. And he was stronger of course, he was a very big guy. When the girl finally got free, got her footing, the boyfriend suddenly dropped his arms and bent down sharply into the water. “I bet she kneed him,” Andy said, pleased with the possibility.

The girl ran out of the water and grabbed a towel on her way past the blankets where they'd all been sitting, sunbathing. Then she climbed into one of their cars. The others had stopped to watch her go, and just before her boyfriend got to the car, and he was surprisingly quick to come after her, she had rolled up all the windows and locked the doors. “I'd guess that girl has just made up her mind,” Margaret said. “Let's hope she can stick to a decision.”

Most afternoons Andy carried the transistor radio around with her from chair to couch to chair, sang a wholehearted “She Loves Me” and a plaintive “Return to Sender,” kept time with her hands on her distended stomach. Sometimes she got up to dance around the porch with her arms raised above her head and her hips swaying seductively in her baggy plaid shorts and sometimes she sang and danced her way down to the water to cool off, wading in just to her thighs, bending down to splash her face and her arms and her shoulders. Margaret kept an eye on Andy and watching her she thought more than once that she was behaving as if she were all alone in the world, as if she couldn't be seen. She wondered if she had done that herself, carrying Sally.

The morning of the groom's dinner, Patrick and Paul and Murray took Paul's pick-up into town to go to the liquor store and to get what was needed from the house. Margaret wanted the big dining-room table and the chairs brought out because she thought everyone should be seated and there was no way to make the cottage table hold them all. She told Bill she didn't want a buffet, would not serve a buffet for Patrick's dinner. She gave the boys a list of the things she wanted from the house, most of which she'd wrapped and boxed up before they came out. The two linen cloths, her own china as well as Sylvia's, her own silver and Sylvia's, the lead crystal glasses, the blue punch bowl, the trays. The butter tarts from Mrs. Rinker. The liquor. Lots of film.

When Patrick and Paul and Murray got back from town, Bill said they should set up in the porch so they could watch the sun go down over the lake while they ate. So the picnic table and the Muskoka chairs were carried from the porch out onto the sand beside the barbecue and the dining-room table was unloaded from the truck and brought around to the front and in through the wide screen-porch door. Getting the cottage table out to the porch was not so straightforward, and after ten minutes of trying to manoeuvre it through the narrower main door, they had to give up and take it off its pedestal, which wasn't easy, given nuts and bolts and screws untouched for decades. After nearly an hour and three different wrenches from Paul's truck, the two tables were finally joined end to end, and they were not dissimilar. When they were covered with the linen cloths they looked as Margaret had hoped they would look, like one long banquet table.

Bill had gone into Clarke's before lunch to get the roast he'd ordered, a big rolled rib, and he'd started it over a hot fire in the middle of the afternoon, adding a few coals every half hour or so and then just leaving it covered to finish on its own as the coals turned to hot ash. Several people who had been walking the beach with their dogs had to run up to the barbecue to pull the dogs away, and one guy, holding his German shepherd firmly by the collar, asked about the chances for an invitation to dinner. This was just a friendly, aren't-we-all-so-damned-lucky kind of question, asked only to give Bill the opportunity to talk about the meal they were going to enjoy that night and about Patrick and Mary, about having a second son who was ready to tie the knot.

Margaret and Mary and Daphne had got up at dawn to try to beat the worst heat of the day. They'd made a huge pot of lobster bisque, the leftover lobster squirrelled away in the freezer after Murray's dinner. They'd baked the angel food cakes and three dozen pull-apart rolls. They'd scrubbed the sweet new potatoes and shelled the fresh peas, which were to be creamed, and cut up the asparagus and the carrots, which were to be caramelized. While they worked Andy sat on a stool in the corner of the kitchen with Krissy on her lap, talking to them and taking pictures of them washing and chopping the vegetables, stirring the bisque, beating the eggs, picking one last time through the nuts for bits of shell. By noon they were all sweating buckets and Margaret said they likely didn't even need the damned oven, the kitchen itself could cook the dinner.

Late in the afternoon, after a rest upstairs with Bill and then a quick swim with a bar of soap, Margaret made a Waldorf salad with the apples she'd got at the cold storage. Instead of walnuts, which no one liked, she used the hickory nuts she'd gathered the previous fall from the ground under the last remaining backyard hickory and smashed with her hammer on the cement stairs that led to the cellar.

The younger women went for their swim and then they changed into sundresses and put the vegetables on to cook and started to set the long table. The blue punch bowl was filled with Sylvia's lemonade and for dessert, on silver trays, there was the choice of Mrs. Rinker's butter tarts or angel food cake, with a milk-glass bowl of fresh strawberries and another of stiff whipped cream to follow the cake around the table. Murray came to the kitchen with a small jar of expensive British horseradish for the beef so Margaret kept her own back.

There were nineteen of them for dinner. Mary's parents came over from their cottage, bringing with them her elderly grandfather. Sylvia's mother drove out from town with Bill's father and Mary's friend Joan brought her boyfriend Dennis, who had a guitar and very long dull hair. Charlotte came from Toronto, arrived just as they were dishing everything up. She had stopped at one of the fruit stands on the highway and bought a bag of mushrooms and when she appeared in the kitchen offering them, Margaret almost opened the fridge to put them away for another time but then caught herself. “Oh,” she said. “Just the thing we're missing.” She quickly scrubbed a pan clean and melted a spoonful of butter over high heat to fry the mushrooms with a quickly chopped handful of sweet onion.

When the table was ready, after Bill had carved the roast and piled it on the platter and the potatoes were tossed with butter and a bit of mint and all the bowls were brought out from the kitchen, Bill put Patrick at one end of the table and Mary at the other, insisting. Everyone else sat wherever they wanted and when they were seated, instead of grace, Murray, who was to be Patrick's best man, stood to offer a toast. Happiness, he said. And health. A long life. Comfort. Joy. Great, mindless, sweaty sex. Progeny. Lifelong friends. Naked ambition. Success. Blue skies. A ton of money or just enough, whichever. A split-level in the suburbs or not, whichever. A red Porsche. Holidays in the sunny south. He wished all these things for them, claimed he spoke for everyone here present.

They ate and drank and talked and lied and laughed on that sloping porch. Neil and Krissy were passed around and across the table like treasures, fed strawberries and peaks of whipped cream from their Great-grandfather Chambers' finger. Mary's mother had brought a camera and Paul got up with Margaret's, took two rolls of film, making sure he got shots of everyone. Sally was so happy she cried. She had been walking around and around the table lightly touching everyone as she passed behind them, and when she squeezed in to stand between Margaret and Charlotte, she could no longer hold it back. The talking gradually stopped and everyone watched as she tried to explain her tears, and when they were finally understood, Charlotte was the one who reached out to comfort her.

An evening breeze flowed around their shoulders and the sun went down for them just as they'd hoped it would, slowly and beautifully, the red and orange and pink and mauve descent filling the sky above the shining water and then spreading, moving in across the water toward the shore. They talked as long as they could over the table but when the darkness brought cold air in off the lake they decided to move inside. Paul lit one of his fires and Dennis started to play his guitar, although not very well. The other men got out the rye and the gin and the crokinole board and the cards for euchre and all the women but Mary, who was after all the bride, and Andy, who was by this time extremely tired, and Sally, who was upstairs getting Neil and Krissy settled down to sleep on their army cots, started to clean up the dishes so the men could bring the tables in.

Charlotte stayed out on the porch long enough to pick up
The Feminine Mystique
from the hammock, asking no one in particular, “Who among you is reading this horrid thing?” Then she tossed it down and walked to the kitchen carrying the silver tray of leftover tarts in one hand and the empty salad bowl in the other.

Seeing Charlotte with her hands full, concluding that she had decided not to sit this one out, before she could put a stop to it, Margaret thought, Now this is an occasion. She took the tray and the salad bowl, handing them off to Mary's mother, and then she turned Charlotte by the shoulders and reached to tie a fresh apron around her waist. It was the first time Margaret had touched her. Feeling the jumpy bones beneath Charlotte's firm flesh, she thought, perhaps as punishment for the earlier thought, Oh, how awful for her.

“We'll let you wash,” she said. “If you wash, the rest of us can get things put away and then we'll be able to join the men that much quicker at the fire.”

To her everlasting credit, Charlotte put her watch and her rings up on the windowsill beside all the others, poured a pink stream of dish soap into the deep porcelain sink, and threw on both taps, full blast.

*   *   *

ALMOST EVERY EVENING
after a light, early supper, Bill and Margaret went for a long walk along the shore of the lake. They would start out barefoot on the warm sand but they carried their shoes because Margaret liked to go far beyond the main beach, she liked especially to go the two miles south to Stonebrook Creek, and they eventually ran into sharp, coarse stones and, at the Point, shale and a broad outcropping of rock.

When she was a girl Margaret had been invited once by a young friend, who was really just the daughter of an old friend of her mother's, to spend three summer days at a cottage which was not on the main beach with Dunworkin and all the other big cottages but down near Stonebrook Creek. Her mother hadn't had many actual friends because she was an occasional kleptomaniac, bringing home things that her father had to quickly find and immediately return or once in a while pay for if it was something that had been partly used up, like perfume, but this one woman had been a true friend and Margaret could remember her quiet kindness. She had been exactly the kind of woman people guessed to be slow-witted but she was not slow-witted in the least, she was simply shy and clumsy the way some women are, the way very young men are before they come into their own, and, regardless, she was very kind.

Angela's parents' cottage was not as old as some of the others at the creek but it was small and dark and ramshackle, with one main room that was mostly kitchen and two bedrooms added on and then another room, a porch, added on to that. On the first day of Margaret's visit, the girls had played hopscotch on the white-sand shore of Lake Huron and practised their swimming strokes both in the air and in the water and then they were given a picnic lunch to eat on a blanket in the dunes. After they'd helped Angela's mother cut up apples for pies, Spies, the apples were called, they used the afternoon to explore, to crouch down low to watch some of the other cottagers through their windows, and to follow the footpaths worn through the trees and scrub brush and poison oak that filled the empty space between the cottages and the road to town.

By this time, Margaret realized that the lemonade she'd shared with Angela at their picnic had worked its way through to her bladder and, because she refused to pull down her bathing suit and squat in the shelter of the trees, as Angela suggested, they had to find the nearest outhouse. At the end of a short dirt path lined on either side with painted stones, when Margaret reached to open the outhouse door, her hand was stopped by the sounds they heard inside, a wet slapping like the hurried beating of a cake at a kitchen table, and then a very sad moan, and then another. Angela put her finger to her lips, the signal for opportunity, for discovery, and they crouched again, as if this position were as natural to them as walking upright, the perfect stance for girls loose in the world. They took their turns at a small knot low in the weathered outhouse boards, each of them encouraging the other with a sharp elbow in the ribs: You look. No, you look. They watched him in silence, although they could see there was little chance they'd be heard. They could not see any part of his face so they couldn't begin to guess his age or his place in the world. It was Margaret's eye at the knothole when he delivered himself, his delivery a big, bursting achievement, and after Angela pushed her away she had no choice, she did have to run into the trees and squat naked to empty herself. And Angela was soon beside her, laughing quietly and holding her stomach and reaching up to pull clean summer leaves from a small maple. When they heard the outhouse door creak open behind them they were careful to look busy, to look away.