The Ladies' Lending Library (15 page)

Sonia sits back from her plate, on which the food’s been cut up into pieces small enough to fit the baby’s mouth. She is studying some screen inside her head on which is projected the intricate ballet of bringing Marta to the cottage in the first place. Max driving through a brown haze of traffic down Queen Street, going under the railway bridge, past the sweet stench from Canada Packers to the mausoleum of a duplex in which Marta’s been waiting since nine that morning. There’s no need for him to stop off at home, since his cottage gear is stored at Kalyna Beach—his new swimsuit, his golfing pants, his windbreaker and short-sleeved shirts, which he hardly ever wears. For the most part, he spends the weekend in droopy trousers smeared all over with oil stains,
or a faded swimsuit in place of shorts, with an even more faded appliqué of a woman in a black swimsuit doing a jackknife from an invisible diving board.

Chucha Marta’s house is the last of the dozen or so houses Max grew up in. Against all common sense, he gave it outright to Marta when their mother died, though she’d willed everything to him: house, furniture, books (all the Ukrainian classics, plus Ukrainian translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, none of which Marta will ever read, but whose spines she lemon-oils religiously). Marta makes him wait at the door, forcing him to ring the bell and pound where the knocker should be, till she feels paid back for the endless hours he’s kept her waiting. When she finally opens the door she doesn’t kiss him or even say his name in greeting, just points to her suitcase at the top of a steep flight of stairs (she’s refused Max’s offers of free renovations: moving her bedroom downstairs, putting in a bathroom on the main floor so she could rent out the top floor if she wants, or simply board it up).

Staring down at her untouched plate, Sonia allows her imagination to add scrolls and flourishes to the script she’s devised. She watches Max struggle with Marta’s case to the car—there must be bricks in it, or gallon jugs filled with powdery dirt from the doll-sized yard. She sees her husband opening the back door for his sister, who refuses to sit beside him in the front
—That is the wife’s place,
Marta’s saying.
Thank God I am no man’s wife.
Two blocks on, she makes him turn back; she has to check that the stove’s turned off, the upstairs windows closed, the door to the summer kitchen locked. When she gets back into the car at last she makes him swear, yet again, that when he returns to the city late on Sunday night, he’ll stop by—then and every other night that she’s away—to make sure no one’s broken in.

By the time they reach the highway it will be hopelessly clogged, and will continue so for the next three hours. Marta, thank God, will have nodded off to sleep, though she’ll wake up every time traffic slows to a standstill; wake up to give Max assorted pieces of her mind on whatever subject occurs to her—the small investments he’s made on her behalf (she suspects him of trying to steal her life savings), the bills he sorts out and pays for her, the weather (those Russians are putting chemicals in the clouds, preventing any rain from falling—didn’t he know that? She heard it from the bishop, the same one who addressed the congregation when the Russians sent up Sputnik, assuring them that they’d find green cheese up there, and nothing more). Sonia lifts her napkin to her mouth to smother her laughter. Max doesn’t notice, but Marta stares at her, those flinty eyes that seem to nick the surface of everything they touch.

“I’ll get the dessert,” Sonia says, scooping up her plate before anyone notices how little she’s eaten.

“Chucha Marta,” one of the children calls out. Sonia clutches the bowl of Jell-O she’s rescued from the overcrowded fridge. It must be Katia speaking—who else would dare to provoke her aunt’s attention? Calling her Chucha, too, when the child’s been told again and again that the proper title for their aunt is “Teetka,” that “Chucha” was Laura’s invention, baby talk they all should have outgrown by now. But Chucha Marta she remains and always will to her nieces, especially Bonnie. She, not Katia, is the brave one calling on her aunt.

“What!” Marta barks.

Bonnie waits as if there’s something in her mouth that she needs to finish chewing. And then she blurts out: “What was her name? The sister who got left behind.”

Silence thick and quivery as the lumps of Jell-O Sonia’s dishing into the mismatched bowls. “Shh,” Laura hisses; Katia kicks Bonnie under the table, and even her father stares down at her as if she’s said something so terrible she will have to be punished. But she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about the dead sister all that afternoon. Suddenly the table and the faces turned to her with such ferocious disapproval go murky, as if they’ve been plunged into dirty water. Bonnie stuffs a finger into the corner of each eye, to stop the tears.

“Sonia, are you going to stand all night over that bowl? Can’t you see your husband needs to get on the road? It will be midnight before he gets home. Give us the rest of our dinner!”

“Here you go, Marta,” Sonia says, making a point of serving her first. Isn’t it just like Marta to go for two birds with one stone, accusing her of being a bad wife as well as a heartless sister-in-law?

Max takes out his handkerchief and mops his forehead. Thank God Marta didn’t hear. What an idiot he was, talking to Bonnie this afternoon—now he’ll have to unsay it all, warn her not to bother Marta again, to keep out of her way. Sonia will be after him, urging him to stand up to Marta, have it out with her at last. If only he could get her to talk about that time in the war, what had happened to her after she’d been left behind; if only she would come out and accuse him—he hadn’t even been born when it happened—then maybe she wouldn’t have this power over him, making him bow to her every wish, and making Sonia rail at him.

She’s risen from the table, Sonia: she’s clapped her hands. “We’ll have to hurry now. Come on, girls—
pospeeshymo!
Max, you can have your coffee later.” Sonia holds out his jacket in one hand, the car keys in the other.

He’s supposed to drive them out to Painter’s Point to see the
sunset, the way he always does on Sunday nights. Marta knows perfectly well that Max prefers to wait till dark before leaving for the city—he says there’s less traffic, or at least, you don’t get so frustrated when you can’t see how slowly the landscape’s going by.

Marta folds her arms across her narrow chest. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“But, Marta, it’s so beautiful, and besides …”

Besides, if she doesn’t come, then Sonia can’t go, because someone other than Darka will have to stay behind with Marta, as if Marta were more helpless than Baby Alix. Marta, who lives every day and night of her life alone in the dark, twisty, narrow house on Dupont Street. Marta, who rushes to shut the curtains on every window as soon as the sun goes down. Marta, who takes pleasure, Sonia’s sure of it, in crossing her at every step.

“How can I come along? Use your head, Sonia, there’s no room in that car of yours.”

“Laura will hold Bonnie, and Katia can easily squeeze in beside you. I’ll have the baby on my lap—”

“You want to squeeze me in till I can’t breathe? Do you know what that will do to my heart?”

“I never said—”

For Christ’s sake, let’s just go before I pick up the axe and split someone’s head open.
Of course Max hasn’t said this out loud, he’s simply grabbed his jacket and slammed the screen door behind him. The children rush after him. Sonia scoops up Alix in one arm, and shoves the other arm through Marta’s, walking her sternly to the car.

As for the sitter without a baby, she stands on the porch, her hands on her hips, the roots of her bleached-out hair shining darkly in the bold evening light.

Painter’s Point is a fifteen-minute drive from Kalyna Beach: it’s in a provincial park, and the view of the lake from the hills is especially lovely at sunset. They’ve watched the sky turn from gold to rose; now the sun is caught in a narrow band of cloud and looks like Saturn in Bonnie’s
Wonder Book of the Stars and Planets.

The girls are sitting cross-legged near the edge of the bluff, apart from their parents, who are stationed at a picnic table farther back, with Alix and Chucha Marta. The grown-ups could be in three different rooms: one in a Toronto office, one at the North Pole with a baby on her lap, one in an old country that has the dim gleam of a black-and-white photograph. The parents are angry: what’s worse, they can’t even have their argument and be done with it, because of Chucha Marta. Yet while Marta pushes Sonia and Max apart, she brings Katia and Laura together, as close as shared hostility permits.

“I hate her,” Laura says. “I wish she’d fall into the lake and drown.”

“We should feed her salad made from rhubarb leaves,” Katia suggests.

“What if we took her for a walk down Tunnel Road and through the poison ivy patch?”

“She hates walking,” Bonnie reminds Laura. “She’s got arthritis.” She was going to tell her sisters about her plan for Chucha Marta, but decides that it has to stay a secret. And so she sits with her chin in her hands, her fingers caging her ears as Laura and Katia rhyme off all the reasons Chucha Marta is so awful.

Because she’s jealous of their father, who is handsome and successful.

Because she’s jealous of their mother, who used to be a fashion model, and is beautiful and married to their father.

Because she was made to polish their father’s shoes up to the day he got married.

Because she never got married.

Because her house is small and dark and the only chair with upholstery is still in its plastic wrapper, that’s gone all cracked and yellow.

Because she has a mole like a piece of chewed-out gum on her forehead.

Because there’s always a funny smell in the bathroom after she’s used it.

Because all she can cook is beans and wieners.

Because she’s never learned to speak proper English.

Because she’s got fallen arches and has to wear men’s shoes.

Because she was born a girl. If she’d been a boy they would never have left her for dead in the old country.

Sonia is watching the water that refuses to catch fire from a crimson sun. The weather’s turning, and they’ll be stuck in the house together the whole week long. If only she’d listened to Mr. Streatfield all those years ago, become the signature model for Sunny Sportswear … But where would she be now, at her age? There was no work, no paying work, for models getting on to forty. If only she were clever like Sasha, or solid, practical like Annie; if she could have done something else than stand before a camera showing off clothes she didn’t own, and a smile that wasn’t hers, she might have been able to be happy. Being happy, she’s decided, is like being beautiful: no matter how good your skin or bones, you have to work at it. She counts on her fingers the women she knows who could be called happy. Men she leaves out of it. They don’t need happiness—they have their jobs, their factories and offices and professions. But if happiness is something you’ve got
to struggle for, what about misery—the kind of pure misery, powerful as ammonia, that Marta’s drenched in?

Marta was a child once—children are born neither happy nor sad, they get slapped at birth but it’s to make them breathe, not cry. Sonia’s mother had once said something about a woman she knew having drunk sourness in with her mother’s milk. Maybe that’s what happened to Marta. Of
course
she’d had a hard start in life, they must never forget what happened to her. Sonia’s mother would never have left a child of hers alone somewhere for eight hours, never mind eight years. Sonia swallows hard and puts her arm round Marta’s shoulder, wanting to say something welcoming, comforting. Marta shakes her off, glaring at her as if she is allergic to, or even terrified of, tenderness. All Sonia can think of now is how she’d like to grab the kerchief off Marta’s head and tie it round her face instead, like a gag.

“Girls!” They can tell from the sound of their mother’s voice that she’s just as angry as when they started out.

“Come on, kids, I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.” Even their father sounds cross.

They know better than to point out that there’s still a blob of sun that hasn’t dropped into the lake. They brush off their shorts and walk back to the car, following their father and mother and Chucha Marta, who carries her big black handbag on her arm as if it were the coffin she’d spent her life savings on.

Max emerges from the bathroom with his hair brushed, his face damp and fragrant from the soapy water he’s splashed across it. One by one he picks up the girls and kisses them; even Laura he holds high, and Laura weighs as much as her mother. Sonia puts out her face for him to kiss. His lips touch her cheek, and then
he’s nodding goodbye to Marta, who’s never been known to kiss anyone, or to suffer being kissed. He waves to Darka, who lifts her hand distractedly.

As the car pulls away, Marta turns to Sonia. On her face is a look that could be mistaken for a smile. “He should have gone earlier.”

“He likes driving at night.”

“You should have made him leave at six, like the other men.”

“He leaves when he wants to, Marta.”

“He was angry—it’s bad to get into a car when you’ve been quarrelling.”

“We were not quarrelling.”

“If something happens to him on the road tonight, you’ll have to live with it for the rest of your days.”

Sonia turns on her heel. She goes off to the children, making sure they’re washed up and in bed; she turns off all the lights in the kitchen and living room. Out on the front steps the air is little cooler than the soup they have to breathe indoors, and yet she shivers, thinking of Max and the icy fist inside her, in the place where her heart should be. She closes her eyes, remembering those first years of their marriage, how they’d had to live with their in-laws, saving money so they could buy their own home outright: no debt, no being beholden. Laura had been born from the Martyn house; not until Katia was well on the way had they been able to move into a home of their own. She will tell all her daughters when the time comes for them to marry: live in a broom closet if you must, but live with your husband on your own.