The Ladies' Lending Library (4 page)

The girls rush out of the shop, slamming the screen door behind them; as soon as they reach the road they collapse, writhing, kicking out their feet, helplessly abandoned to their laughter. “Did you see her
tsytsi
when she was yelling at us?” Katia shrieks. “They were shaking like—” “Hostess cupcakes!” Tania supplies, which sets them off into fresh snorts of laughter. Finally they wind down, wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands. Propped against one another, they start singing a song they’d had to learn at Ukrainian School:
My chemnyi deetyh, Ukrayeenski kveety.
Their high, sweet voices dart in with the flies through the worn screen door.
We obedient children, flowers of Ukraine.

Mrs. Maximoynko shakes her head, and her massive bosom shakes in sympathy. Pan and Pani Durkowski nod. (They are always addressed by these Ukrainian equivalents of Mr. and Mrs.;
they seem to demand that dignity, for all that they work as janitors at the cathedral hall.) When they’d first come to Kalyna Beach, they’d gone round to the various mothers, suggesting they could organize a morning program for the children right on the beach. Calisthenics and recitations from the national poets, followed by a round of Ukrainian folksongs. All the mothers had thanked them, saying what a wonderful idea such a program would be, but when it came to the first session, half of the children hadn’t shown up, and the rest had wandered away before the stride jumps were finished. The mothers apologized, but there was nothing they could do. “They go to Ukrainian School all year,” one had explained, “so they really want a holiday while they’re up here.” And as Sonia Martyn had ventured: “The children were born here, they don’t feel the same way about the old country as we do, there’s no point in forcing them.” But then, Pan Durkowski had growled to his wife, look at those Martyns, changing their name, making it English-sounding. Their children had been the last ones of all to be enrolled at Ukrainian School. In vain had Sonia explained that Laura, who had spoken nothing but Ukrainian till she was five, had come home from English school one day with a note from the principal:
It would be better if your child stopped speaking Russian in the playground.

“Russian!” Pan Durkowski had snorted. “The idiot principal thought that they were Russian?”

Pani Durkowska had tried to explain it to her husband: “Max has to be careful, he has his practice to build, and Sonia has always been frightened—” adding, under her breath, “the way all of us who weren’t born here are frightened—that we could be picked up and shipped back, without so much as a word of warning.”

“But to let some stupid
Anhleek
believe there is no difference
between speaking the noble, the ancient, the beautiful Ukrainian tongue and being Communists!” Pan Durkowski had roared. “That is a crime, I tell you—a crime as bad as murder in the first degree!”

He is fond of roaring, Pan Durkowski: here he is now, thundering forth as his wife stares up at the portrait of the brown-haired, pudding-faced woman in diamanté armour, to whom she’d sworn allegiance at her citizenship hearing the year before. “Who is going to carry on the battle?” he exclaims, bringing his fist down hard on the counter, so that the jawbreakers rattle in their jar. “Who will hold their hands over their hearts and march off to free our poor Ukraine? The youth of today? Pah! They have no respect; all their parents teach them is to put out their hands for whatever they want. While in the Homeland, children are beaten for speaking Ukrainian instead of Russian in the schools! Beaten!”

He looks as if he would like to run out and perform that precise punishment on Tania and Katia. Instead, he takes off his glasses, breathes against them till the lenses steam, polishes them with a pale blue handkerchief in his shaking hands. His wife brings her gaze back from the portrait of the Youthful Queen to Mrs. Maximoynko’s small, heart-shaped face, so incongruous against her steel-wool hair, the bulk of her breasts. Pani Durkowska is anxious to change the subject; thankfully, she remembers that they need a length of copper pipe to repair the bathroom sink: her husband is a real handyman, she tells Mrs. Maximoynko, using the English word,
hendy-men.
The proprietor of Venus Variety checks her supply of hardware, sells them the pipe, and bids the Durkowskis good day.

The old people walk out into the stinging light, shoes scraping over the asphalt as they make their way along Tunnel Road, back to their cottage. For it is far too hot for them to be on the beach
at this hour: they have had their morning walk long before breakfast and will return when the families are all indoors eating their suppers, and the beach is deserted. The Durkowskis prefer quiet pursuits: reading, gardening, playing solitaire. Perhaps they are not so very disappointed, after all, that their Beachside Ukrainian School has come to nothing.

Katia and Tania are far, far ahead of the elderly couple, on the part of Tunnel Road that goes to the Shkurkas’ cottage—they still call it that, even though Mr. Shkurka’s been gone for the past eight years—“probably married again and fathered a dozen sons.” At least that’s what they’ve heard Katia’s aunt Zirka say on the Plotskys’ veranda, talking with the other mothers. The girls are a little drunk with what Katia calls “being bad.” It’s their defining attribute; their mothers have had endless phone calls from their Ukrainian School teachers—Miss Marchenko, who wears her hair in a lofty coil, and whom the girls call Bagel Head in her hearing; Mr. Khriniuk, who does have a peculiar habit of tapping his front teeth with his forefinger, and whom they’ve christened Pan Pecker.

Pan Pecker had caught the girls drinking Cherry Cokes at the Sombrero Restaurant next to the Funeral Parlour when they were supposed to be in class, doing dictation; the week before that, they’d disrupted the rehearsal of the Harvest Dance by the most disgraceful jerking and shoving (by which Miss Marchenko meant the Twist). The only way their mothers could get them to behave was by threatening to take them out of Ukrainian School altogether, which would have meant that, except for the summers, they’d never have seen one another at all. For Tania lives in the north, and Katia in the west end of the city; and though Sonia and
Sasha see a lot of each other at Kalyna Beach, once they’re back in Toronto they could be living in different provinces. Chastened, the girls would behave for a few Saturdays, and then come up with some new piece of deviltry—Pan Pecker’s word for it—whereupon the long, complaining phone calls would begin again.

Dark hair, dark eyes, olive-coloured skin over their toothpick bodies—they are so alike they could be twins, thinks Lesia Baziuk, catching sight of Tania and Katia from the front porch of Mrs. Shkurka’s house. The women are sitting at a small table facing the road: Mrs. Baziuk has opened her little case of cosmetics and is showing Nettie Shkurka the five different shades of nail polish Avon is stocking this season. Mrs. Baziuk has one eye on Mrs. Shkurka’s face, its show of superior suspicion at the names and colours of the products; Nettie is such a prude that she’ll end by rejecting any hint of what even a bit of face powder and a natural-tint lipstick could do for her, settling instead on the invisibles: moisturizer, cleanser and the inevitable cotton balls.

Lesia Baziuk’s other eye is trained on her son, Billy, who is sitting patiently on the porch steps below them, looking out at the road, his hands folded nicely in his lap. Every morning she gives him his medicine, one pill to ward off seizures, the other, as the doctor said, to settle him down and make her life a little easier. For Frank Kozak gives her no help at all with Billy. “
Another guy has sown the seed and done the deed
” had been his response to Lesia’s first few pleas for assistance. Now, she wouldn’t trust him to comb Billy’s hair or shine his shoes. Frank Kozak, as everyone knows, thinks only of himself: besides, he’s always tippling from that sleek, silver flask he keeps in his pocket wherever he goes. He is also married, though not to Mrs. Baziuk, whose husband died in a hunting accident many years ago. When the children are
nearby, Frank Kozak is referred to by the adults as Mrs. Baziuk’s “special friend.” Sasha has been heard to exclaim that she can’t for the life of her understand why Lesia Baziuk has anything to do with him, and Sonia Martyn responds that it might have something to do with Frank’s having a clean and decent job, working for the Insurance.

Lesia’s made sure he’s kept that job; at home, she ladles his booze out to him, glass by glass, calculating how much he can take and still do a reasonable day’s work; she’s arranged to get a portion of his paycheque deposited in her own account each month. His boss is a kind man with a son Billy’s age; he is willing to overlook a lot to help Lesia out, as long as Frank’s numbers keep adding up all right, as by some miracle they do. There’s a trust account in Billy’s name, and when the time comes he’ll have to go into a Home, but not while there’s a breath left in her body. He’s an affectionate boy, obedient and thoughtful in his own way. Unlike those giggling show-offs. Cruel as if they had—Mrs. Baziuk thinks for a moment—knives instead of hearts in their chests. Jackknives! She can see the faces they’re pulling as they look at her Billy; she tells herself that it’s their mothers who should be pitied instead of her—better to have a sweet, slow boy like Billy than those two she-devils.

What his mother can’t see, and what the girls are making faces at, is Billy’s hand pumping at his crotch. This isn’t a matter of peanut butter sandwiches: Billy is old enough to drink, and drive, and even get married. “Meat on a stick,” Katia whispers to Tania, who snorts with laughter as Mrs. Baziuk shakes her fist and shouts down the road, “Have you no shame?”

Mornings belong to the beach. The children spend their time running back and forth between the water and the dunes: roasting, then plunging into the lake, running across the sandbars till the water rises up to their knees, and then their waists, and then their shoulders. They play tag, or practise dead man’s float, or just bob up and down: on stormy days they dive right through the breakers, swallowing pints of water and spluttering onto shore only when their mothers force them out, hovering with faded beach towels, rubbing them dry till their skins feel as though they’ve been pushed through graters.

Mostly, the weather is cloudless: by the time the children have quit the lake and raced to their different fortresses behind the dunes, they’re seared with sun. On the east end of the beach, the boys are sequestered; on the west, the girls. Even though two of those boys, Yuri and Andriy, are their cousins, the Martyn girls have agreed to their banishment, on the beach, at least, and in daylight. But in the evenings, when their mothers lie slumped on sofas, having cooked supper and swept the floors for the hundredth time, having rinsed out bathing suits and hung them on the line with the sodden, sand-clumped towels, some of the older boys and girls go off in groups of three or four, walking along Tunnel Road, playing tag at the edge of the woods, spying at the lighted windows of other people’s cottages.

Right now the Martyn girls and their friends—Tania, Vlada, Lenka, Rocky-short-for-Roksolana—lie flopped on their towels for as long as they can stand the sun. Every so often, they spring up and sprint to the water, shrieking at how the sand is cooking their feet. Their mothers grumble as this same sand sprays into their faces while the brown bodies leap by, an exotic species of animal they’ve no idea how to name.

Between nine a.m., when the mothers march the children down to the beach, and noon, when it’s time to gather them up and head back to make lunch, the women may get five minutes all to themselves, spread-eagled on their blankets, drinking the sun through their pores, the hot sand cradling their bodies like the most gentle of lovers. Sometimes it’s so still they can hear flies crawling over the debris of potato chips or browned apple slices; sometimes a strong, warm wind plays over the women, fanning skin redolent of baby oil or the first-aid smell of Noxema. Waves thump the shore and a few gulls screech lazily overhead while, neither far away nor too close by, children’s voices bubble up like water from a spring. When the children are being good, making sandcastles or playing tag behind the dunes, their mothers can shut their eyes and let themselves drift, as if they were pieces of wood bobbing up and down in water so clear and shallow it could not drown a spider.

On her cotton blanket, red bleached-out to pink, Sonia stretches her body into the endless air and sun; she’s a kite floating wherever the wind will take her. Max and Marta are still far, far away in the city, small black ants she could stretch out her finger and crush, one after the other. No one is drowning, no one is crying or shouting or grabbing at her; she could sleep here forever and ever. Except that a shadow’s suddenly fallen across her, a cold, soaked towel of a shadow that knows her name, and sits down beside her, and begins to talk. Because the shadow is married to her brother, and Sonia will never hear the end of it if she pretends Zirka is merely a cloud passing overhead, she must stop being that kite sailing away and attend to what her sister-in-law is saying in that piercing voice of hers.

“She’s growing up fast, your Laryssa.”

“Laura. She only answers to Laura, now.”

“Fourteen in November, isn’t she? We’d like to buy her something special—it’s an important birthday, she’s getting to be a young lady.”

“We’re getting her contact lenses. There’s a man at the Medical Arts Building who fits them.”

“
Bozhe,
Soniu—it’s dangerous, putting things in your eyes. You can go blind. I know I’d never forgive myself if—”

“Max has checked it out—it’s perfectly safe. They’ve been wearing them for years in the States. And I know girls who’ve worn them without any trouble—models I used to work with.”

“Oh. Models.” Zirka’s voice puckers with disapproval. She may have worked before she married, but at a respectable job at Beaver Bakery, making and decorating cakes for birthdays and weddings. Whereas Sonia had exposed herself to photographers (from outside the community, most of them); she’d even spent time in New York, staying in hotels meeting heaven knows who. Of course, the Metelskys had been as poor as fleas; whatever Sonia earned must have come in all too handy but still—“Models,” Zirka repeats, nodding her head. “Like the one you named Bonnie after—what was her name?”