The Ladies' Lending Library (30 page)

Laura sits up straight. “Shut up,” she growls. “Shut your dirty trap!”

Tania pokes Katia; she’s honour-bound to join in now. More from habit than from any desire to jump to Tania’s aid, or even to rile her sister, Katia starts to chant, “
Nasty Nastia
,” at which Laura’s face goes dark as thunder—purple thunder. “
Dupo
,” Laura snaps. “You’re one to talk. Don’t think I haven’t seen you—” Something in Laura’s tone, even more than her words, warns Katia, makes her try to drown out her sister. “Fatty and Nasty—what a pair! You two going steady?” And then she starts to sing: “
Laura and Nastia, sitting in a tree
—”

Laura staggers to her feet. Fists clenched, she leans over her sister, who doesn’t even bother to look up at her as she completes the rhyme: “
Kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-en-gee.
”

“Tell her, Katia,” she hisses. “Tell Tania what you did with Yuri in the sleep-house, just the two of you. How you took off your clothes, and rubbed yourselves together, bare naked. I’ve seen them, Tania, so don’t go calling me a liar. I’ve seen them with my own eyes!”

And Katia, who should have laughed out loud at this ridiculous claim, who should have resumed the chant of “Fatty and Nasty,” just sits there staring at the sand. She is not about to defend herself, or betray her cousin by telling them how, when she and Yuri had rubbed their bare bodies together on the sleep-house bed, they felt nothing at all—nothing except an embarrassment so deep it made them believe they must have committed the worst of sins. Tania won’t believe her if she tells her—Tania standing there with her arms hanging and a sick expression on her face as she whispers, “Did you, Katia? With Yuri—did you? Did you?”

The other girls have got to their feet and are pulling their towels into their arms, their eyes round and staring. Something terrible is about to happen, they all know this: something in them wants it to happen, wants there to be a scene like in the movies, with grand
gestures and the scrub of violins, something earth-shattering, even if that earth is only the sand dunes on their little stretch of beach.

But all that happens is Bonnie, running up to Laura, grabbing the hand Laura’s folded into a fist, poised over Katia’s head. Bonnie pulling and pulling Laura until, shaking her off, Laura staggers over the dunes, her feet sliding in their clumsy flip-flops, so that she trips and falls and has to pick herself up again, in view of them all. As Katia throws herself back down on her towel, pressing her face as hard as she can into the sand.

It never rains but it pours, Sonia complains to Darka. There’s Katia refusing to come in for lunch, Laura off sulking in her room, Bonnie sick to her stomach—thank God the baby’s sleeping, at least. Sonia would prefer it, would be grateful, even, if Darka gave her a weary smile and said something like “No kidding” or “You bet”—something, anything that could be taken as assent, even approval of Sonia’s having, this last day of summer, thrown in the sandy towel, given up on disciplining the children, keeping order. But Darka might as well be one of them, a fifth child for Sonia to keep in line, and the most difficult, the most frightening, by far.

For Darka’s changed in a way that Sonia can’t pin down, but that worries her far more than the peroxide and baby dolls and movie magazines have done. All of a sudden, the girl has given up—given up on aggravating Sonia, flouting her wishes, rebelling. For the past few days, she hasn’t worn a trace of the makeup she’d somehow smuggled up to the cottage—Sonia had pretended not to notice the smears of rouge, the gobs of mascara Darka thought she was being so careful in applying. Nor has the girl spent hours curing her hair or flouncing about in her two-piece at the beach, when she should have been looking after Alix. Yes, Darka’s given up—the
way women of a certain age give up on looking or acting attractive.

Good as gold, Darka sits back on the kitchen chair, letting Sonia dye her hair back to its natural colour. Fumes rise from the bottle, making Sonia frown and purse her lips as she applies the tint. Dark brown globs are staining the ragged towel round Darka’s neck: they might as well fall on her face for all she cares—he cares. She doesn’t exist for him any longer: all this weekend he’s stayed put, smoking his cigarettes, reading the papers on Lesia Baziuk’s veranda, drinking the glasses of rye and ginger she grudgingly doles out. As if he hadn’t a care in the world; as if he’d made Darka vanish, not just from his view, but from the whole, wide world. The first night she’d thought he was playing it safe, biding his time. But on Saturday nothing had happened, nothing. Even when she walked past his cottage on her way to the store, he stared at his paper as if she were some ghost stopping before him, looking up at him, willing him to return her gaze. A ghost of a ghost, without the power to summon a single shiver from his pale, pink skin.

It’s not the makeup she misses; to tell the truth, it isn’t Frank Kozak she misses, either. It’s the feeling he gave her of being the most important person in the world, the most precious thing he’d ever held. Far more important than his cigarettes or even the booze, she was his honey, his baby, his sugar-pie. Darka makes a choking, gagging sound.

Sonia’s afraid that somehow she must have got some of the hair dye into the girl’s eyes, or even her mouth. “Darka?” she cries, “are you all right? It won’t take long, now—another five minutes. Darka?”

“I’m okay,” the girl says at last. “It’s the stink that’s getting to me.”

In the one room in her cottage with a lock on the door, Nettie Shkurka is washing her hair. Not that she has anything to hide: her hair really is her crowning glory: long as her arm and not a grey hair to disfigure the rich, mahogany colour that her daughter, alas, has failed to inherit. This is only one of many ways in which Nastia’s been a disappointment to her mother, but Nettie has seen enough of the families at Kalyna Beach to know it’s a universal law that daughters let their mothers down. She also recognizes that, as things go, she should feel relatively confident in the daughter department. Nastia would sooner throw herself under a bus than talk back to her; she’s not going to run after boys; and she’ll continue to do well at school, entering the teaching profession just as her mother and grandmother have done before her. In fact, Nettie’s only worry about Nastia is how to keep her as good as she is now—if not as good as gold, then as copper: bright, serviceable, but needing to be shined up every so often.

If Nettie locks the bathroom door when she washes her long, thick, red-brown hair, it’s more as a gesture against the evil eye than anything else. For she can’t help feeling vulnerable when that hair is unpinned and splayed down her back; vulnerable when bending over the small sink, fearful lest the tap dig into her scalp, intent as she is on rinsing out each scintilla of soap. For Nettie’s obsession is perfection. “People are always watching you,” she has told her daughter from the moment the child could give signs of an independent will. “They’re always watching and waiting for you to make a mistake, fall flat on your face. I never gave them that satisfaction, and neither will you.”

The only way to achieve perfection, Nettie knows, is to have it beaten into you, beaten till you’re black and blue. The way her
mother beat her; the way Nettie beats her daughter at home in their cramped apartment, and here, in the equally constricted cottage. While the mothers of Kalyna Beach lie down on their blankets at the water’s edge and their children make sandcastles or sunbathe in the dunes, Nettie is taking a hairbrush or a wooden spoon to Nastia. Or else the peeled birch wand kept by the front door, that makes its whistling sound instead of the
thwack, thwack
of the hairbrush.

Nettie always makes sure the beatings start when Nastia’s as far as possible from the bathroom with its lockable door—in the kitchen drying dishes, or searching the bookshelves in the sitting room for something she actually wants to read. Always, they occur when the girl has let down her guard, can be taken by surprise by what, after all, she should have suspected was coming: the smack of something hard against a softer target, shins or arms or back. And the words, a rhythmic accompaniment to the blows:
“Ty durna kor-o-va.”
Nastia never says anything in reply, for her mother’s logic is unassailable: if she weren’t a stupid cow, why would her mother be beating her? She knows she must save her energy for running, ducking, deking this way and that, so she can get to the bathroom without her mother realizing where she’s heading.

Nastia is small for her age; there is scarcely room on her skin for all the bruises she wears. Were Laura ever to ask, Nastia would say the beatings hurt less than you’d imagine, that she carries her wounds as lightly as if they were the badges you get at Brownies, or those fabric souvenirs of Pioneer Village or the CNE meant to be stitched to your shirt or jacket. But Laura doesn’t ask, because, in spite of how smart Laura is, smart at things they never teach you at school, she doesn’t guess what Nastia’s secret is—not just Nastia’s, but Nettie’s, too. Doesn’t guess even though Nastia’s
given her all the clues she can; led her by the hand; shown her the writing on the wall.

As Nettie Shkurka lifts her long, damp strands of hair, sectioning them off with the end of the thin-handled, stainless-steel comb with its strong, small teeth, she gazes not in the mirror, but at the wallpaper: she disapproves of mirrors, preferring the way she thinks she looks to what actually confronts her in the glass. Thus it happens that, scanning the pattern of tropical fish weaving in and out of ribboned weeds, she discovers a text as deliberate as a message in a bottle. Not some splotch of rising damp or dirt or grease, but small, immaculate lettering scratched right into the paper, for anyone to find.

At first, Nettie won’t believe her eyes. It can’t be her name etched into the wallpaper; it can’t be
I hate
in front of her name. Who would do such a thing? Who would wish her ill—who could say something so cruel? For a moment she feels as though she’s going to faint; she wants to stagger off to her room and lie down, unpick the words from her memory as if they were a spoiled stretch of embroidery. But then she tightens her grip on the handle of the comb and pushes the tray of rollers away from her. Half her hair up, half down, her mouth taut, her eyes hard, she steals from the bathroom, down the corridor, to her daughter’s room.

Nastia is sitting on her carefully made bed, reading a movie magazine Laura has pilfered from Darka’s stash. She’s feeling both guilty and bored: her mother says such magazines are garbage, and now Nastia’s seen for herself that it’s true. There’s nothing in the words or pictures she can make sense of, no idea worth following. So that when she looks up from the exposé on Eddie Fisher and sees her mother standing before her, her arm raised, she is almost willing to take the punishment she knows she deserves. Almost
but not quite, for the woman by her bed isn’t recognizable as her mother, this woman with wet hair swinging across her face and rippling over her shoulders, with half a helmet of rollers stabbed into her head. Even as the blows come down, Nastia’s confused, unable to shield herself.

This time, for some reason Nastia can’t fathom, the beating isn’t a matter of bruises, but of jabs and cuts. She knows she must think harder, faster, must find some way she hasn’t tried before to get away. Before the steel comb strikes not just at her arms and legs, which can be covered up with long sleeves and trousers, but at her face as well.

Down at the beach, Lenka and Rocky are drinking cream soda behind the dunes, enjoying the absence of Katia and Tania who, they’ve come to realize, have lorded it over them far too long. Laura is helping Baby Alix build a complicated castle by the water’s edge. Mrs. Vesiuk is still on patrol; the boys are diving off the raft, the air is still and the lake a bowl of blue cream. Sonia has come down with a pitcher of Kool-Aid for the children, accompanied by a listless Darka, and a troubled Zirka; the women stand on the dry sand, absorbing the sun’s heat into muscles strained from lifting and fetching. There is nothing to deflect the sound when it comes: a thick, dark, ugly sound, like the clots of blood at the bottom of the toilet bowl when it’s
that time of the month
for those who are young ladies now.

The sound is coming out of an animal of some kind; it is tumbling down the bluff at the far end of the beach, not falling off the edge, but sliding and shoving through the undergrowth, holding on to the trunks of saplings, grabbing at bushes to keep its feet on the ground. Above it comes another sound, just as ugly, but high-pitched, like a drill, shouting the same word, over and over and over.

Laura clutches her shovel while her mother and Mrs. Vesiuk run towards the sobbing, shaking form that has come to rest on the sand. Zirka is struggling up the hill to where the shrieking has suddenly stopped. Now Mrs. Vesiuk lifts the thing in her arms and strides away with it as if she were carrying nothing heavier than a damp towel. If it’s an animal, it’s not the bear cub the mothers have always been warning them about; if it’s a person, Laura doesn’t want to know who it could be. Blood is pouring from the head, streaking the sugary sand below.

And then it’s all over: Mrs. Vesiuk has disappeared with her bundle up the steps to her cottage, and Sonia seems to be apologizing to them all, mothers and children.

“Everything’s all right,” she keeps saying. “There’s been a little accident at the Shkurkas’ cottage, that’s all. Don’t worry. Nastia will be just fine.”

The only people left on the beach now are Laura and her mother. They are standing apart, facing the lake, their arms wrapped round their waists. For once, an onlooker would be struck not by the difference but by the sameness between them: the sag of the shoulders, the hang of the head, the arms like bandages or a wide belt holding in what must not be let out.

Overhead, the sky is a pale, stainless blue: the water below it is still perfectly calm, unruffled by even a cat’s paw of wind. Water slaps, slaps, slaps at the shore, and from nowhere a pair of dragonflies darts across the lip of wet, packed sand, and over the water. For a long moment, Sonia cannot say where she is, or even what time of day it is, and which day, at that. It’s not just the end-of-summer collapse, the weak but grateful giving-up, for just one day of the year, of all rules and order. It’s the feeling that
she’s fought against all summer, fighting to keep it from drowning her: fear of the worst, no hope for the best.