The Ladies' Lending Library (18 page)

It is late by now, late enough for all the lights to have been switched off, and all the grown-ups to be asleep. Bonnie lies listening to her sister’s breathing in the bed across from her; looks at the moonlight cutting through the windows. Against the white-painted walls she makes out shapes and stains projected like images from the home movies her father takes every Christmas. And suddenly it comes to her, one of those truths that startle and convince at the same instant. If Laura were awake she would call out to her, crawl into her bed to whisper the truth of the secret Chucha Marta has been hiding from them all this time.

But Laura is sleeping and besides, Bonnie has learned that secrets—someone else’s secrets—are something you are bound to keep. And so she lies back in her bed, with her hands clasped tight, as if to keep from letting go of it. Not the real name of Marta’s sister, but the fact that her aunt has forgotten that name.

This is the only secret Chucha Marta keeps.

While Bonnie lies awake in the moonlight, Katia is wishing she hadn’t gone to sleep over at the Plotskys’, after all. For something’s surfaced between her and Tania, something that puts both girls on their guard.

They are standing before the spotted mirror in Tania’s bedroom, under a lamp filled with the bodies of fried flies.

“
What
did you call them?”

“Teddies.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Katia says crossly, elbowing Tania away from the mirror. If someone were to ask her why she’s so irritable, she would answer,
on account of Yuri.
For in some way that Katia doesn’t fully understand, but that she knows in her bones, it is because of Yuri (whom neither girl mentions by name, or even as “he”) that they are jostling for space in front of the mirror in Tania’s bedroom, their pyjama tops rolled up, the startlingly white skin of their chests exposed.

Katia touches the reflection in the glass: two small dark circles like tarnished pennies.

“Whatever you call them, yours aren’t any bigger than mine,” Tania declares.

“They’re not doing anything much for either of us,” Katia observes coldly.

Now it’s Tania’s turn to push Katia out of the way and to monopolize the mirror. The poor showing of their teddies is partly the mirror’s fault, she decides. It’s old and the silver backing is worn away in splotches; it looks as though it has some disease like the one that kills off her grandmother’s roses.

Tania frowns, pushing her elbows together, making a V of her arms. A faint line forms at her breastbone.

“Look, Katia, do you see that? It’s a
cleavice.
”

“No it’s not—it’s just your skin wrinkling up. You can’t have a cleavice without breasts, and all you’ve got are teddies. All
we’ve
got,” she adds, trying to be fair, pulling her pyjama top back down. They have both asked their mothers, in vain, for training bras. Sonia rejected the idea with a flat no, refusing even to discuss the issue. Sasha laughed, saying she’d never thought of breasts being like puppies or horses, needing to be broken in.

After Laura had turned thirteen, Katia had had a chance to read the
You’re a Young Lady Now
pamphlet that their mother had left on Laura’s bed one day. The pamphlet was tinted a soft pink, and the paper looked as if it were made of marshmallow. There were roses in soft focus on the cover, and the text was all in italics. Before Laura had come home from school, Katia had read it from cover to cover, but the purpose of the booklet had baffled her. It made no mention of the body parts whose names she’d learned years ago from the older kids at school and whose proper names she’d seen on a mimeographed sheet handed out by Laura’s Health and Gym teacher. The pamphlet was as bewildering as the “Modess because …” ads in their mother’s
Vogue
magazines, which always featured a woman with prominent collarbones in an evening gown, standing alone on a terrace at sunset. “Because what?” she’d ask her mother, whose invariable reply was, “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Tania, however, had proved the best detective of them all; snooping in her mother’s dresser back home, she found, under the chiffon scarves and never-used embroidered handkerchiefs,
The Woman’s Lifelong Guide to Health and Happiness,
by Dr. Reginald Thwaites, a hefty volume containing a detailed description of puberty, pregnancy and menopause. She locked herself into
the bathroom—the only room in the house to possess a lock—and wolfed down the first two sections, passing on the information in chunky parcels to Katia, and thereby supplying most of the information that
You’re a Young Lady Now
had omitted from its rose-coloured pages.

It had been a considerable shock to them both, this news that every twenty-eight days their bodies would start to bleed, and that they’d have to wear something like giant bandages between their legs. And curl up with hot-water bottles and take Aspirin for cramps that the book described as a rehearsal for the pain a woman experiences in childbirth. The idea that they will have to go through all this just so they can have babies is completely unacceptable to them: babies shriek in the middle of the night, and throw up on your shoulder or soak your lap when you’re asked to hold them. Babies generate mountains of wash, so that, from the time of their birth till they hit three, their mothers disappear behind a wall of white-flagged laundry. What is even more appalling is the fact that they will be expected to feed these babies from their own bodies, from breasts they imagine will turn as long and hard and narrow as the bottles dropped off in the milkbox each morning.

“We don’t have to feed babies—we don’t have to
have
babies—because you can’t have one without a husband, and we’re never getting married,” Tania had pointed out.

“Won’t we end up like Chucha Marta, then?” Katia had asked, imagining a fate even worse than being mummified in diapers: that of wearing a head scarf and old black cardigan all of your life, sitting in a house that smells sour as onions, and glorying in your own misery, as she’s heard her mother say of Chucha Marta.

“Of course we’re not going to become like her,” Tania had scolded. “We’re going to China, remember?”

Katia did remember, but now, as she lies back in the top bunk bed, with Tania fidgeting below her, she’s not so sure. Whether geography is stronger than biology. How far Tania is to be trusted.

The one part of puberty that does not seem to be disgusting or imprisoning, the girls have decided, is the actual growing of breasts. In fact, Tania’s mother’s book specifies that the pain and mess of menstruation are more than compensated for by the shy pride a young girl may take in the development of her bosom. If Tania had read further in the book, in a section called “Some Problems You May Need to Know About,” she would have learned about lumps and cysts, and changes in the breast that should be checked out immediately by a doctor. But she reads only the puberty section, from which she memorizes the various names for the parts of the breast (
nipple, aureole, ducts
) and agrees with Dr. Thwaites that breasts are not only desirable but downright prestigious. Unless, of course, you happen to have been born to a flat-chested woman.

It’s one more thing, one supreme grudge, to hold against their mothers. The girls understand what the term
heredity
means, and they’re unconvinced when Sonia and Sasha reassure them that of course they’ll develop one day—that every girl does. These speeches always end with remarks about how they should just enjoy being children; how these, after all, are the best years of their lives. Listening to such advice, the girls don’t groan, or shrug, or roll their eyes. Instead, they look down or away, embarrassed at the pity they feel for their mothers, who don’t understand how different their daughters’ lives will be from their own, and how the very shape of their future is tied up, somehow, in that most conspicuous of secrets, the growing of breasts.

Katia has no memory at all of Baba Motria, who died when
she was the age Baby Alix is now, but what she’d loved best about Baba Laryssa, besides all the baking she did for them, and the preserving of strawberries and raspberries in thick glass jars, was her bosom. Lying with her head against it, falling asleep in her baba’s lap on winter afternoons, when she and Laura had been left at the big house on Dovercourt Road so their parents could attend what they called a “function.” In the summer Baba Laryssa wore cotton shifts in bright colours, with V necks; the skin of her bosom always felt cool and moist, reminding Katia of the times when she’d helped her baba with the kneading and punching of dough.

What Katia is thinking, as Tania’s fidgets finally give way to long, steady breaths, and Mr. Plotsky’s snoring rattles the partition, is that her mother had been some kind of exception to the rule; that had she worn a training bra, Sonia’s breasts would have attained the same bountiful size as Baba Laryssa’s, and as Katia’s own could do. Not once does she turn her thoughts to Chucha Marta’s hard and skinny chest: as far as Katia can see, her aunt can only doubtfully be called a woman, and had certainly never been a young lady. Lying back with her arms crossed tight, trying to shore up the muscles of what Dr. Thwaites calls the “chest wall,” Katia concentrates her thoughts instead on Mrs. Maximoynko.

Of all the women at Kalyna Beach that summer, with the possible exception of Darka, there is no woman whose body so fascinates the girls as that of the owner of Venus Variety. Tania had once shown Katia a picture of the Venus de Milo with her arms cut off just below the shoulders, which only made her breasts the more noticeable. And there was nothing wrong with them as breasts, the girls agreed, until they saw Mrs. Maximoynko’s—really saw and appreciated them—that summer. After which they
felt a generous pity for the Venus de Milo, who might indeed have given both her arms for the shopkeeper’s breasts.

Mrs. Maximoynko is barely five foot, stocky, strong and sporting that mysterious attribute called a widow’s peak, which no one has ever been able to explain to the girls’ satisfaction: why does she have one if her husband is still alive? Why doesn’t Mrs. Baziuk have one? Though very short, Mrs. Maximoynko never wears high heels because she thinks them an invention of what she calls “that devil known as the common man”—a phrase she pronounces as though what she has in mind is the common housefly. Mr. Maximoynko, she makes it known, is thoroughly uncommon: an excellent businessman, he runs Superior Fruits and Vegetables on Augusta, and knows enough, as she puts it to Pani Durkowska, not to bother her. The Maximoynkos had met in one of the Displaced Persons camps in Germany, after the war; they have no children. Such a shame, the women sigh; such a waste, say the men, raising cupped hands to their chests and making jokes about evaporated milk.

She is short, Mrs. Maximoynko, but she has enormous presence that makes you think she should be five foot ten at the very least. Partly on account of her voice, which is both deep and loud—if she stands at the door of her shop and yells after you as you’re running down to the beach with a Fudgsicle you’ve pinched from the cooler, you can be sure your mother will hear her half a mile away. She has never yet told on Katia and Tania, though she might have done so a hundred times over: for spoiling merchandise (the cakes with their pushed-in maraschino cherries) and minor shoplifting (not only Fudgsicles but also Jell-O powder to be poured from the waxy package straight onto the tongue, turning it purple, yellow, green and rotting the teeth, as Mrs. Maximoynko has observed to herself with grim content). Plus general disturbances,
of course: bursting into fits of giggles at the sight of certain brand names: Skwee-Gee, Betty Brite.

The other source of Mrs. Maximoynko’s overwhelming presence, is, of course, her breasts. She is not a fat woman, and this makes the architecture of her bosom all the more imposing. There is no nonsense about her dress or appearance: habitually, she wears flip-flops, navy blue shorts and washed-out sleeveless blouses. But under the blouses, she wears a bra that, Sasha Plotsky swears, must have been designed by a structural engineer. She doesn’t care that the bra straps—broad slabs of dingy white cotton—are plainly visible on her shoulders, or that when she bends down to fish some disobedient sack of ice cubes from the freezer you can see right down her blouse to her brassiere and the flesh that erupts from the cups, no matter how many wires and ridges and bones there might be underpinning them. For they aren’t made of fat, or anything jiggly or jelly-like, Mrs. Maximoynko’s breasts, but a substance that makes the girls think of a cross between the marble from which the Venus de Milo is carved, and the resistless, overpowering flow of lava, as they’ve seen it in a documentary film at school. No one could push you around, they think, with those defences: you could cut your way through the most difficult life like an icebreaker cleaving vast northern seas.

“What do you think they look like when she isn’t wearing her bra?”

“Do you think she ever takes it off?”

“Of course she does—to sleep, and to put it through the wash.”

“I just can’t picture her without it. It’s like the Queen—she must take her clothes off to have baths and change into her pyjamas, but I can’t think of her without her crown, and those ball gowns she wears, and the elbow gloves.”

Some days later the girls have come up with a plan to spy on Mrs. Maximoynko; to create a situation in which she will expose herself without her bra on. They have been driven to this expedient on account of Darka, who has proven far less amenable to being spied upon than they’d hoped. The only window into Darka’s room is at the back of the cottage, located in a place where anyone could catch them lurking. Besides, they’d need a ladder—there are no trees under the window offering footholds and no shrubs behind which they could conceal themselves. The bathroom’s worse than useless: its sole window is equally high up, and smaller than a porthole. At last they decide that the only thing to do is to reverse their intention: they will attempt to catch a glimpse not of Darka’s breasts, but rather of her bra, from which they can hypothesize what the reality of her breasts might be. Of course, they’ve had plenty of chances to watch Darka’s breasts wiggle and jiggle as she picks up Baby Alix on the beach: the top of her two-piece is as revealing as any bra could be. But there is something about an intensely intimate object of dress that is meant to be hidden from view: a brassiere—any brassiere—has an aura of power about it that no bathing suit could match.