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Little bride. I was twenty years old, five feet seven inches tall, weighing between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty pounds, but some people-Chess’s boss’s wife, and the older secretary in his office, and Mrs. Gorrie upstairs, referred to me as a little bride. Our little bride, sometimes. Chess and I made a joke of it, but his public reaction was a look fond and cherishing. Mine was a pouty smile-bashful, acquiescent.
We lived in a basement in Vancouver. The house did not belong to the Gorries, as I had at first thought, but to Mrs. Gorrie’s son Ray. He would come around to fix things. He entered by the basement door, as Chess and I did. He was a thin, narrow-chested man, perhaps in his thirties, always carrying a toolbox and wearing a workman’s cap. He seemed to have a permanent stoop, which might have come from bending over most of the time, attending to plumbing jobs or wiring or carpentry. His face was waxy, and he coughed a good deal. Each cough was a discreet independent statement, defining his presence in the basement as a necessary intrusion. He did not apologize for being there, but he did not move around in the place as if he owned it. The only times I spoke to him were when he knocked on the door to tell me that the water was going to be turned off for a little while, or the power. The rent was paid in cash every month to Mrs. Gorrie. I don’t know if she passed it all on to him or kept some of it out to help with expenses. Otherwise all she and Mr. Gorrie had-she told me so-was Mr. Gorrie’s pension. Not hers. I’m not nearly old enough, she said.
Mrs. Gorrie always called down the stairs to ask how Ray was and whether he would like a cup of tea. He always said he was okay and he didn’t have time. She said that he worked too hard, just like herself. She tried to fob off on him some extra dessert she had made, some preserves or cookies or gingerbread-the same things she was always pushing at me. He would say no, he had just eaten, or that he had plenty of stuff at home. I always resisted, too, but on the seventh or eighth try I would give in. It was so embarrassing to go on refusing, in the face of her wheedling and disappointment. I admired the way Ray could keep saying no. He didn’t even say, “No, Mother.” Just no.
Then she tried to find some topic of conversation.
“So what’s new and exciting with you?”
Not much. Don’t know. Ray was never rude or irritable, but he never gave her an inch. His health was okay. His cold was okay. Mrs. Cornish and Irene were always okay as well.
Mrs. Cornish was a woman whose house he lived in, somewhere in East Vancouver. He always had jobs to do around Mrs. Cornish’s house as well as around this one-that was why he had to hurry away as soon as the work was done. He also helped with the care of her daughter Irene, who was in a wheelchair. Irene had cerebral palsy. “The poor thing,” Mrs. Gorrie said, after Ray told her that Irene was okay. She never reproached him to his face for the time he spent with the afflicted girl, the outings to Stanley Park or the evening jaunts to get ice cream. (She knew about these things because she sometimes talked on the phone to Mrs. Cornish.) But to me she said, “I can’t help thinking what a sight she must be with the ice cream running down her face. I can’t help it. People must have a good time gawking at them.”
She said that when she took Mr. Gorrie out in his wheelchair people looked at them (Mr. Gorrie had had a stroke), but it was different, because outside the house he didn’t move or make a sound and she always made sure he was presentable. Whereas Irene lolled around and went gaggledy-gaggledy-gaggledy. The poor thing couldn’t help it.
Mrs. Cornish could have something in mind, Mrs. Gorrie said. Who was going to look after that cripple girl when she was gone?
“There ought to be a law that healthy people can’t get married to someone like that, but so far there isn’t.”
When Mrs. Gorrie asked me to go up for coffee I never wanted to go. I was busy with my own life in the basement. Sometimes when she came knocking on my door I pretended not to be home. But in order to do that I had to get the lights out and the door locked the instant I heard her open the door at the top of the stairs, and then I had to stay absolutely still while she tapped her fingernails against the door and trilled my name. Also I had to be very quiet for at least an hour afterward and refrain from flushing the toilet. If I said that I couldn’t spare the time, I had things to do, she would laugh and say, “What things?”
“Letters I’m writing,” I said.
“Always writing letters,” she said. “You must be homesick.”
Her eyebrows were pink-a variation of the pinkish red of her hair. I did not think the hair could be natural, but how could she have dyed her eyebrows? Her face was thin, rouged, vivacious, her teeth large and glistening. Her appetite for friendliness, for company, took no account of resistance. The very first morning that Chess brought me to this apartment, after meeting me at the train, she had knocked at our door with a plate of cookies and this wolfish smile. I still had my travelling hat on, and Chess had been interrupted in his pulling at my girdle. The cookies were dry and hard and covered with a bright-pink icing to celebrate my bridal status. Chess spoke to her curtly. He had to get back to work within half an hour, and after he had got rid of her there was no time to go on with what he’d started. Instead, he ate the cookies one after another, complaining that they tasted like sawdust.
“Your hubby is so serious,” she would say to me. “I have to laugh, he always gives me this serious, serious look when I see him coming and going. I want to tell him to take it easy, he hasn’t got the world on his shoulders.”
Sometimes I had to follow her upstairs, torn away from my book or the paragraph I was writing. We sat at her dining-room table. There was a lace cloth on it, and an octagonal mirror reflecting a ceramic swan. We drank coffee out of china cups and ate off small matching plates (more of those cookies, or gluey raisin tarts or heavy scones) and touched tiny embroidered napkins to our lips to wipe away the crumbs. I sat facing the china cabinet in which were ranged all the good glasses, and the cream-and-sugar sets, the salt-and-peppers too dinky or ingenious for daily use, as well as bud vases, a teapot shaped like a thatched cottage, and candlesticks shaped like lilies. Once every month Mrs. Gorrie went through the china cabinet and washed everything. She told me so. She told me things that had to do with my future, the house and the future she assumed I would have, and the more she talked the more I felt an iron weight on my limbs, the more I wanted to yawn and yawn in the middle of the morning, to crawl away and hide and sleep. But out loud I admired everything. The contents of the china cabinet, the housekeeping routines of Mrs. Gorrie’s life, the matching outfits that she put on every morning. Skirts and sweaters in shades of mauve or coral, harmonizing scarves of artificial silk.
“Always get dressed first thing, just as if you’re going out to work, and do your hair and get your makeup on”-she had caught me more than once in my dressing gown-“and then you can always put an apron on if you have to do the washing or some baking. It’s good for your morale.”
And always have some baking on hand for when people might drop in. (As far as I knew, she never had any visitors but me, and you could hardly say that I had dropped in.) And never serve coffee in mugs.
It wasn’t put quite so baldly. It was “I always-” or “I always like to-” or “I think it’s nicer to-”
“Even when I lived away off in the wilds, I always liked to-” My need to yawn or scream subsided for a moment. Where had she lived in the wilds? And when?
“Oh, away up the coast,” she said. “I was a bride, too, once upon a time. I lived up there for years. Union Bay. But that wasn’t too wild. Cortes Island.”
I asked where that was, and she said, “Oh, away up there.”
“That must have been interesting,” I said.
“Oh, interesting,” she said. “If you call bears interesting. If you call cougars interesting. I’d rather have a little civilization myself.”
The dining room was separated from the living room by sliding oak doors. They were always open a little way so that Mrs. Gorrie, sitting at the end of the table, could keep an eye on Mr. Gorrie, sitting in his recliner in front of the living-room window. She spoke of him as “my husband in the wheelchair,” but in fact he was only in the wheelchair when she took him out for his walk. They didn’t have a television set-television was still almost a novelty at that time. Mr. Gorrie sat and watched the street, and Kitsilano Park across the street and Burrard Inlet beyond that. He made his own way to the bathroom, with a cane in one hand and the other hand gripping chair backs or battering against the walls. Once inside he managed by himself, though it took him a long time. And Mrs. Gorrie said that there was sometimes a bit of mopping up.
All I could usually see of Mr. Gorrie was a trouser leg stretched out on the bright-green recliner. Once or twice he had to make this drag and lurch along to the bathroom when I was there. A large man-large head, wide shoulders, heavy bones.
I didn’t look at his face. People who had been crippled by strokes or disease were bad omens to me, rude reminders. It wasn’t the sight of useless limbs or the other physical marks of their horrid luck I had to avoid-it was their human eyes.
I don’t believe he looked at me, either, though Mrs. Gorrie called out to him that here I was visiting from downstairs. He made a grunting noise that could have been the best he could do by way of a greeting, or dismissal.
There were two and a half rooms in our apartment. It was rented furnished, and in the way of such places it was half furnished, with things that would otherwise have been thrown away. I remember the floor of the living room, which was covered with leftover squares and rectangles of linoleum-all the different colors and patterns fitted together and stitched like a crazy quilt with strips of metal. And the gas stove in the kitchen, which was fed with quarters. Our bed was in an alcove off the kitchen-it fitted into the alcove so snugly that you had to climb into bed from the bottom. Chess had read that this was the way the harem girls had to enter the bed of the sultan, first adoring his feet, then crawling upward paying homage to his other parts. So we sometimes played this game.
A curtain was kept closed all the time across the foot of the bed, to divide the alcove from the kitchen. It was actually an old bedspread, a slippery fringed cloth that showed yellowy beige on one side, with a pattern of winy roses and green leaves, and on the other, bedward-side stripes of wine red and green with flowers and foliage appearing like ghosts in the beige color. This curtain is the thing I remember more vividly than anything else in the apartment. And no wonder. In the full spate of sex, and during its achieved aftermath, that fabric was in front of my eyes and became a reminder of what I liked about being married-the reward for which I suffered the unforeseen insult of being a little bride and the peculiar threat of a china cabinet.
Chess and I both came from homes where unmarried sex was held to be disgusting and unforgivable, and married sex was apparently never mentioned and soon forgotten about. We were right at the end of the time of looking at things that way, though we didn’t know it. When Chess’s mother had found condoms in his suitcase, she went weeping to his father. (Chess said that they had been given out at the camp where he had taken his university military training-which was true-and that he had forgotten all about them, which was a lie.) So having a place of our own and a bed of our own where we could carry on as we liked seemed marvellous to us. We had made this bargain, but it never occurred to us that older people-our parents, our aunts and uncles-could have made the same bargain, for lust. It seemed as if their main itch had been for houses, property, power mowers, and home freezers and retaining walls. And, of course, as far as women were concerned, for babies. All those things were what we thought we might choose, or might not choose, in the future. We never thought any of that would come on us inexorably, like age or weather.
And now that I come to think of it honestly, it didn’t. Nothing came without our choice. Not pregnancy, either. We risked it, just to see if we were really grown up, if it could really happen.
The other thing I did behind the curtain was read. I read books that I got from the Kitsilano Library a few blocks away. And when I looked up in that churned-up state of astonishment that a book could bring me to, a giddiness of gulped riches, the stripes were what I’d see. And not just the characters, the story, but the climate of the book became attached to the unnatural flowers and flowed along in the dark-wine stream or the gloomy green. I read the heavy books whose titles were already familiar and incantatory to me-I even tried to read The Betrothed -and in between these courses I read the novels of Aldous Huxley and Henry Green, and To the Lighthouse and The Last of Cheri and The Death of the Heart. I bolted them down one after the other without establishing any preferences, surrendering to each in turn just as I’d done to the books I read in my childhood. I was still in that stage of leaping appetite, of voracity close to anguish.
But one complication had been added since childhood-it seemed that I had to be a writer as well as a reader. I bought a school notebook and tried to write-did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can. I did this over and over again until I had only the notebook cover left. Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle-excitement and despair, excitement and despair. It was like having a secret pregnancy and miscarriage every week.
Not entirely secret, either. Chess knew that I read a lot and that I was trying to write. He didn’t discourage it at all. He thought that it was something reasonable that I might quite possibly learn to do. It would take hard practice but could be mastered, like bridge or tennis. This generous faith I did not thank him for. It just added to the farce of my disasters.
Chess worked for a wholesale grocery firm. He had thought of being a history teacher, but his father had persuaded him that teaching was no way to support a wife and get on in the world. His father had helped him get this job but told him that once he got in he was not to expect any favors. He didn’t. He left the house before it was light, during this first winter of our marriage, and came home after dark. He worked hard, not asking that the work he did fit in with any interests he might have had or have any purpose to it that he might once have honored. No purpose except to carry us both toward that life of lawnmowers and freezers which we believed we had no mind for. I might marvel at his submission, if I thought about it. His cheerful, you might say gallant, submission.
But then, I thought, it’s what men do.
I went out to look for work myself. If it wasn’t raining too hard I went down to the drugstore and bought a paper and read the ads while I drank a cup of coffee. Then I set out, even in a drizzle, to walk to the places that had advertised for a waitress or a salesgirl or a factory worker-any job that didn’t specifically require typing or experience. If the rain had come on heavily I would travel by bus. Chess said that I should always go by bus and not walk to save money. While I was saving money, he said, some other girl could have got the job.
That was in fact what I seemed to be hoping for. I was never altogether sorry to hear it. Sometimes I would get to my destination and stand on the sidewalk, looking at the Ladies’ Dress Shop, with its mirrors and pale carpeting, or watch the girls tripping downstairs on their lunch break from the office that needed a filing clerk. I would not even go inside, knowing how my hair and fingernails and flat scuffed shoes would tell against me. And 1 was just as daunted by the factories-I could hear the noise of the machines going in the buildings where soft drinks were bottled or Christmas decorations put together, and I could see the bare lightbulbs hanging down from the barnlike ceilings. My fingernails and fiat heels might not matter there, but my clumsiness and mechanical stupidity would get me sworn at, shouted at (I could also hear the shouted orders above the noise of the machines). I would be disgraced and fired. I didn’t think myself capable even of learning to operate a cash register. I told the manager of a restaurant that, when he actually seemed to be thinking of hiring me. “Do you think you could pick it up?” he said, and I said no. He looked as if he had never heard anybody admit to such a thing before. But I spoke the truth. I didn’t think I could pick things up, not in a hurry and out in public. I would freeze. The only things that I could pick up easily were things like the convolutions of the Thirty Years’ War.
The truth is, of course, that I didn’t have to. Chess was supporting me, at our very basic level. I didn’t have to push myself out into the world because he had done it. Men had to.
I thought that maybe I could manage the work in the library, so I asked there, though they hadn’t advertised. A woman put my name on a list. She was polite but not encouraging. Then I went into bookstores, choosing the ones that looked as if they wouldn’t have a cash register. The emptier and untidier the better. The owners would be smoking or dozing at the desk, and in the secondhand stores there was often a smell of cat.
“We’re not busy enough in the winter,” they said. One woman said I might come back in the spring. “Though we’re not usually very busy then, either.”
Winter in Vancouver was not like any winter I had ever known. No snow, not even anything much in the way of a cold wind. In the middle of the day, downtown, I could smell something like burned sugar-I think it had to do with the trolley wires. I walked along Hastings Street, where there wouldn’t be another woman walking-just drunks, tramps, poor old men, shuffling Chinese. Nobody spoke an ill word to me. I walked past warehouses, weedy lots where there wouldn’t be even a man in sight. Or through Kitsilano, with its high wooden houses crammed with people living tight, as we were, to the tidy Dunbar district, with its stucco bungalows and pollarded trees. And through Kerrisdale, where the classier trees appeared, birches on the lawns. Tudor beams, Georgian symmetry, Snow White fantasies with imitation thatched roofs. Or maybe real thatched roofs, how could I tell?
In all these places where people lived, the lights came on around four in the afternoon, and then the streetlights came on, the lights in the trolley buses came on, and often, too, the clouds broke apart in the west over the sea to show the red streaks of the sun’s setting-and in the park, through which I circled home, the leaves of the winter shrubs glistened in the damp air of a faintly rosy twilight. People who had been shopping were going home, people at work were thinking about going home, people who had been in the houses all day came out to take a little walk that would make home more appealing. I met women with baby carriages and complaining toddlers and never thought that so soon I’d be in the same shoes. I met old people with their dogs, and other old people, slow moving or in wheelchairs, being propelled by their mates or keepers. I met Mrs. Gorrie pushing Mr. Gorrie. She wore a cape and beret of soft purple wool (I knew by now that she made most of her own clothes) and a lot of rosy face coloring. Mr. Gorrie wore a low cap and a thick scarf wrapped around his neck. Her greeting to me was shrill and proprietary, his nonexistent. He did not look as if he was enjoying the ride. But people in wheelchairs rarely did look anything more than resigned. Some looked affronted or downright mean.
“Now, when we saw you out in the park the other day,” Mrs. Gorrie said, “you weren’t on your way back from looking for a job then, were you?”
“No,” I said, lying. My instinct was to lie to her about anything.
“Oh, good. Because I was just going to say, you know, that if you were out looking for a job you really should fix yourself up a little bit. Well, you know that.”
Yes, I said.
“I can’t understand the way some women go out nowadays. I’d never go out in my flat shoes and no makeup on, even if I was just going to the grocery store. Let alone if I was going to ask somebody to give me a job.”
She knew I was lying. She knew I froze on the other side of the basement door, not answering her knock. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she went through our garbage and discovered and read the messy, crumpled pages on which were spread out my prolix disasters. Why didn’t she give up on me? She couldn’t. I was a job set out for her-maybe my peculiarities, my ineptitude, were in a class with Mr. Gorrie’s damages, and what couldn’t be righted had to be borne.
She came down the stairs one day when I was in the main part of the basement doing our washing. I was allowed to use her wringer-washer and laundry tubs every Tuesday.
“So is there any chance of a job yet?” she said, and on the spur of the moment I said that the library had told me they might have something for me in the future. I thought that I could pretend to be going to work there-I could go and sit there every day at one of the long tables, reading or even trying my writing, as I had done occasionally in the past. Of course, the cat would be out of the bag if Mrs. Gorrie ever went into the library, but she wouldn’t be able to push Mr. Gorrie that far, uphill. Or if she ever mentioned my job to Chess-but I didn’t think that would happen either. She said she was sometimes afraid to say hello to him, he looked so cross.
“Well, maybe in the meantime…,” she said. “It just occurred to me that maybe in the meantime you would like to have a little job sitting in the afternoons with Mr. Gorrie.”
She said that she had been offered a job helping out in the gift shop at St. Paul’s Hospital three or four afternoons a week. “It’s not a paid job or I’d have sent you to ask about it,” she said. “It’s just volunteer work. But the doctor says it’d do me good to get out of the house. ‘You’ll wear yourself out,’ he said. It’s not that I need the money, Ray is so good to us, but just a little volunteer job, I thought-” She looked into the rinse tub and saw Chess’s shirts in the same clear water as my flowered nightgown and our pale-blue sheets.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “You didn’t put the whites and the col-oreds in together?”
“Just the light coloreds,” I said. “They don’t run.”
“Light coloreds are still coloreds,” she said. “You might think the shirts are white that way, but they won’t be as white as they could be.”
I said I would remember next time.
“It’s just the way you take care of your man,” she said, with her little scandalized laugh.
“Chess doesn’t mind,” I said, not realizing how this would become less and less true in the years ahead and how all these jobs that seemed incidental and almost playful, on the borders of my real life, were going to move front and center.
I took the job, sitting with Mr. Gorrie in the afternoons. On one little table beside the green recliner there was spread a hand towel-to catch spills-and on top of it were his pill bottles and liquid medicines and a small clock to tell him the time. The table on the other side was stacked with reading material. The morning paper, last evening’s paper, copies of Life and Look and Maclean’s, which were all big floppy magazines then. On the lower shelf of this table was a pile of scrapbooks-the kind that children use at school, with heavy brownish paper and rough edges. There were bits of newsprint and photographs sticking out of them. These were scrapbooks that Mr. Gorrie had kept over the years, until he had his stroke and couldn’t cut things out anymore. There was a bookcase in the room, but all it held was more magazines and more scrapbooks and a half shelf of high-school textbooks, probably Ray’s.
“I always read him the paper,” Mrs. Gorrie said. “He hasn’t lost his ability, but he can’t manage to hold it up with both hands, and his eyes get tired out.”
So I read to Mr. Gorrie while Mrs. Gorrie, under her flowered umbrella, stepped lightly off to the bus stop. I read him the sports page and the municipal news and the world news and all about murders and robberies and bad weather. I read the letters to the editor and the letters to a doctor who gave medical advice and the letters to Ann Landers, and her replies. It seemed that the sports news and Ann Landers roused his interest the most. I would sometimes mispronounce a player’s name or mix up the terminology, so that what I read made no sense, and he would direct me with dissatisfied grunts to try again. When I read the sports page he was always on edge, intent and frowning. But when I read Ann Landers his face relaxed and he made noises that I took to be appreciative-a kind of gurgling and deep snorting. He made these noises particularly when the letters touched on some especially feminine or trivial concern (a woman wrote that her sister-in-law always pretended that she had baked a cake herself, even though the paper doily from the bakeshop was still under it when it was served) or when they referred-in the careful manner of that time-to sex.
During the reading of the editorial page or of some long rigmarole about what the Russians said and what the Americans said at the United Nations, his eyelids would droop-or, rather, the eyelid over his better eye would droop almost all the way and the one over his bad, darkened eye would droop slightly-and the movements of his chest would become more noticeable, so that I might pause for a moment to see if he had gone to sleep. And then he would make another sort of noise-a curt and reproving one. As I got used to him, and he got used to me, this noise began to seem less like reproof and more like reassurance. And the reassurance was not just about his not being asleep but about the fact that he was not at that moment dying.
His dying in front of my eyes had been at first a horrible consideration. Why should he not die, when he seemed at least half dead already? His bad eye like a stone under dark water, and that side of his mouth pulled open, showing his original, wicked teeth (most old people then had false teeth) with their dark fillings glowering through the damp enamel. His being alive and in the world seemed to me an error that could be wiped out at any moment. But then, as I said, I got used to him. He was on a grand scale, with his big noble head and wide laboring chest and his powerless right hand lying on his long trousered thigh, invading my sight as I read. Like a relic, he was, an old warrior from barbarous times. Eric Blood-Axe. King Knut.
My strength is failing fast, said the sea king to his men.
I will never sail the seas, like a conqueror again.
That was what he was like. His half-wrecked hulk of a body endangering the furniture and battering the walls as he made his momentous progress to the bathroom. His smell, which was not rank but not reduced to infantile soap-and-talcum cleanliness, either-a smell of thick clothing with its residue of tobacco (though he didn’t smoke anymore) and of the enclosed skin that I thought of as thick and leathery, with its lordly excretions and animal heat. A slight but persistent smell of urine, in fact, which would have disgusted me on a woman but which seemed in his case not just forgivable but somehow an expression of ancient privilege. When I went into the bathroom after he had been there, it was like the lair of some mangy, still powerful beast.
Chess said I was wasting my time baby-sitting Mr. Gorrie. The weather was clearing now, and the days were getting longer. The shops were putting up new displays, stirring out of their winter torpor. Everybody was more apt to be thinking of hiring. So I ought to be out now, seriously looking for a job. Mrs. Gorrie was paying me only forty cents an hour.
“But I promised her,” I said.
One day he said he had seen her getting off a bus. He saw her from his office window. And it wasn’t anywhere near St. Paul’s Hospital.
I said, “She might have been on a break.”
Chess said, “I never saw her out in the full light of day before. Jesus.”
I suggested taking Mr. Gorrie for a walk in his wheelchair, now that the weather had improved. But he rejected the idea with some noises that made me certain there was something distasteful to him about being wheeled about in public-or maybe about being taken out by somebody like me, obviously hired to do the job.
I had interrupted my reading of the paper to ask him this, and when I tried to continue he made a gesture and another noise, telling me he was tired of listening. I laid the paper down. He waved the good hand toward the pile of scrapbooks on the lower shelf of the table beside him. He made more noises. I can only describe these noises as grunts, snorts, hawkings, barks, mumbles. But by this time they sounded to me almost like words. They did sound like words. I heard them not only as peremptory statements and demands (“Don’t want to,” “Help me up,” “Let me see the time,” “I need a drink”) but as more complicated pronouncements: “Christ, why doesn’t that dog shut up?” or “Lot of hot air” (this after I’d read some speech or editorial in the paper).
What I heard now was “Let’s see if there’s anything in here better than what’s in the paper.”
I pulled the stack of scrapbooks off the shelf and settled with them on the floor by his feet. On the front covers were written, in large black crayoned letters, the dates of recent years. I flipped through 1952 and saw the cutout newspaper account of George VI’s funeral. Above it the crayon lettering. “Albert Frederick George. Born 1885. Died 1952.” The picture of the three queens in their mourning veils.
On the next page a story about the Alaska Highway.
“This is an interesting record,” I said. “Do you want me to help you start another book? You could choose what things you want me to cut out and paste in, and I’d do it.”
His noise meant “Too much trouble” or “Why bother now?” or even “What a stupid idea.” He brushed aside King George VI, wished to see the dates on the other books. They weren’t what he wanted. He motioned toward the bookcase. I brought out another pile of scrapbooks. I understood that it was the book for one particular year that he was looking for, and I held each book up so that he could see the cover. Occasionally I flipped the pages open in spite of his rejection. I saw an article about the cougars on Vancouver Island and one about the death of a trapeze artist and another about a child who had lived though trapped in an avalanche. Back through the war years we went, back through the thirties, through the year I was born in, nearly a decade beyond that before he was satisfied. And gave the order. Look at this one. 1923.
I started going through that one from the beginning.
“January snowfall buries villages in-”
That’s not it. Hurry up. Get on with it.
I began to flip the pages.
Slow down. Go easy. Slow down.
I lifted the pages one by one without stopping to read anything till we reached the one he wanted. There. Read that.
There was no picture or headline. The crayoned letters said, “ Vancouver Sun, April 17, 1923.” “Cortes Island,” I read. “Okay?” Read it. Go on.
Cortes Island. Early Sunday morning or sometime late Saturday night the home of Anson James Wild at the south end of the island was totally destroyed by fire. The house was at a long distance from any other dwelling or habitation and as a result the flames were not noticed by anyone living on the island. There are reports that a fire was spotted early Sunday morning by a fishing boat going towards Desolation Sound but those on board thought somebody was burning brush. Knowing that brush fire posed no danger due to the wet condition of the woods at present they proceeded on their way.
Mr. Wild was the proprietor of Wildfruit Orchards and had been a resident on the island for about fifteen years. He was a solitary man whose previous history had been in the military service but he was cordial to those he met. He was married some time ago and had one son. It is believed he was born in the Atlantic Provinces.
The house was reduced to ruin by the blaze and the beams had fallen in. The body of Mr. Wild was found amongst the charred remains burnt almost beyond recognition.
A blackened tin thought to have contained kerosene was discovered within the ruins.
Mr. Wild’s wife was away from home at the time, having on the previous Wednesday accepted a ride on a boat that was picking up a load of apples to be transported from her husband’s orchard to Comox. She was intending to return the same day but remained away for three days and four nights due to engine trouble with the boat. On Sunday morning she returned with the friend who had offered her the ride and together they discovered the tragedy.
Fears were entertained for the Wilds’ young son who was not in the house when it burned. A search was started as soon as possible and before dark on Sunday evening the child was located in the woods less than a mile from his home. He was wet and cold from being in the underbrush for several hours but otherwise unharmed. It appears that he took some food with him when leaving the house as he had some pieces of bread with him when found.
An inquest will be held in Courtenay into the cause of the fire which destroyed the Wilds’ home and resulted in the loss of Mr. Wild’s life.
“Did you know these people?” I said.
Turn the page.
August 4, 1923. An inquest held in Courtenay on Vancouver Island into the fire that caused the death of Anson James Wild of Cortes Island in April of this year found that suspicion of arson by the deceased man or by person or persons unknown cannot be substantiated. The presence of an empty kerosene can at the site of the fire has not been accepted as sufficient evidence. Mr. Wild regularly purchased and made use of kerosene, according to Mr. Percy Kemper, storekeeper, Manson’s Landing, Cortes Island.
The seven-year-old son of the deceased man was not able to provide any evidence about the fire. He was found by a search party several hours later wandering in the woods not far from his home. In response to questioning he said that his father had given him some bread and apples and told him to walk to Manson’s Landing but that he lost his way. But in later weeks he has said that he does not remember this being the case and does not know how he came to lose his way, the path having been travelled by him many times before. Dr. Anthony Helwell of Victoria stated that he had examined the boy and believes that he may have run away at the first sight of the fire perhaps having time to lay hold of some food to take with him, which he has no recollection of now. Alternately he says the boy’s story may be correct and recollection of it suppressed at a later date. He said that further questioning of the child would not be useful because he is probably unable to distinguish between fact and his imagination in this matter.
Mrs. Wild was not at home at the time of the fire having gone to Vancouver Island on a boat belonging to James Thompson Gorrie of Union Bay.
The death of Mr. Wild was ruled to be an accident due to misadventure, its cause being a fire of origins unknown.
Close up the book now.
Put it away. Put them all away.
No. No. Not like that. Put them away in order. Year by year. That’s better. Just the way they were.
Is she coming yet? Look out the window.
Good. But she will be coming soon.
There you are, what do you think of that?
I don’t care. I don’t care what you think of it.
Did you ever think that people’s lives could be like that and end up like this? Well, they can.
I did not tell Chess about this, though I usually told him anything I thought would interest or amuse him about my day. He had a way now of dismissing any mention of the Gorries. He had a word for them. It was “grotesque.”
All the dingy-looking little trees in the park came out in bloom. Their flowers were a bright pink, like artificially colored popcorn.
And I began working at a real job.
The Kitsilano Library phoned and asked me to come in for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. I found myself on the other side of the desk, stamping the due date in people’s books. Some of these people were familiar to me, as fellow borrowers. And now I smiled at them, on behalf of the library. I said, “See you in two weeks.”
Some laughed and said, “Oh, a lot sooner,” being addicts like myself.
It turned out that this was a job I could handle. No cash register-when fines were paid you got the change out of a drawer. And I already knew where most of the books were on the shelves. When it came to filing cards, I knew the alphabet.
More hours were offered to me. Soon, a temporary full-time job. One of the steady workers had had a miscarriage. She stayed away for two months and at the end of that time she was pregnant again and her doctor advised her not to come back to work. So I joined the permanent staff and kept this job until I was halfway into my own first pregnancy. I worked with women I had known by sight for a long time. Mavis and Shirley, Mrs. Carlson and Mrs. Yost. They all remembered how I used to come in and mooch around-as they said-for hours in the library. I wished they hadn’t noticed me so much. I wished I hadn’t come in so often.
What a simple pleasure it was, to take up my station, to face people from behind the desk, to be capable and brisk and friendly with those who approached me. To be seen by them as a person who knew the ropes, who had a clear function in the world. To give up my lurking and wandering and dreaming and become the girl in the library.
Of course, I had less time for reading now, and sometimes I would hold a book in my hand for a moment, in my work at the desk-I would hold a book in my hand as an object, not as a vessel I had to drain immediately-and I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.
But this scare would vanish in a minute.
The women I worked with recalled the times they had seen me writing in the library.
I said I had been writing letters. “You write your letters in a scribbler?” “Sure,” I said. “It’s cheaper.”
The last notebook grew cold, hidden in the drawer with my tumbled socks and underwear. It grew cold, the sight of it filled me with misgiving and humiliation. I meant to get rid of it but didn’t.
Mrs. Gorrie had not congratulated me on getting this job.
“You didn’t tell me you were still looking,” she said. I said I’d had my name in at the library for a long time and that I’d told her so.
“That was before you started working for me,” she said. “So what will happen now about Mr. Gorrie?” “I’m sorry,” I said.
“That doesn’t do him much good, does it?”
She raised her pink eyebrows and spoke to me in the high-falutin’ way I had heard her speak on the phone, to the butcher or the grocer who had made a mistake in her order.
“And what am I supposed to do?” she said. “You’ve left me high and dry, haven’t you? I hope you keep your promises to other people a little better than your promises to me.”
This was nonsense, of course. I had not promised her anything about how long I’d stay. Yet I felt a guilty unease, if not guilt itself. I hadn’t promised her anything, but what about the times when I hadn’t answered her knock, when I’d tried to sneak in and out of the house unnoticed, lowering my head as I passed under her kitchen window? What about the way I’d kept up a thin but sugary pretense of friendship in answer to her offers-surely-of the real thing?
“It’s just as well, really,” she said. “I wouldn’t want anybody who wasn’t dependable looking after Mr. Gorrie. I wasn’t entirely pleased with the way you were taking care of him, anyway, I can tell you that.”
Soon she had found another sitter-a little spider woman with black, netted hair. I never heard her speak. But I heard Mrs. Gorrie speaking to her. The door at the top of the stairs was left open so that I should.
“She never even washed his teacup. Half the time she never even made his tea. I don’t know what she was good for. Sit and read the paper.”
When I left the house nowadays the kitchen window was flung up and her voice rang out over my head, though she was ostensibly talking to Mr. Gorrie.
“There she goes. On her way. She won’t even bother to wave at us now. We gave her a job when nobody else would have her, but she won’t bother. Oh, no.”
I didn’t wave. I had to go past the front window where Mr. Gorrie was sitting, but I had an idea that if I waved now, even if I looked at him, he would be humiliated. Or angered. Anything I did might seem like a taunt.
Before I was half a block away I forgot about both of them. The mornings were bright, and I moved with a sense of release and purpose. At such times my immediate past could seem vaguely disgraceful. Hours behind the alcove curtain, hours at the kitchen table filling page after page with failure, hours in an overheated room with an old man. The shaggy rug and plush upholstery, the smell of his clothes and his body and of the dry pasted scrap-books, the acres of newsprint I had to make my way through. The grisly story that he had saved and made me read. (I never understood for a moment that it was in the category of the human tragedies I honored, in books.) Recalling all that was like recalling a period of illness in childhood when I had been willingly trapped in cozy flannelette sheets with their odor of camphorated oil, trapped by my own lassitude and the feverish, not quite decipherable messages of the tree branches seen through my upstairs window. Such times were not regretted so much as naturally discarded. And it seemed to be a part of myself-a sickly part?-that was now going into the discard. You would think marriage would have worked this transformation, but it hadn’t, for a while. I had hibernated and ruminated as my old self-mulish, unfeminine, irrationally secretive. Now I picked up my feet and acknowledged my luck at being transformed into a wife and an employee. Good-looking and competent enough when I took the trouble. Not weird. I could pass.
Mrs. Gorrie brought a pillowcase to my door. Showing her teeth in a hopeless, hostile smile, she asked if it might be mine. I said without hesitation that it wasn’t. The two pillowcases that I owned were on the two pillows on our bed.
She said in a martyred tone, “Well, it’s certainly not mine.”
I said, “How can you tell?”
Slowly, poisonously, her smile grew more confident. “It’s not the kind of material I’d ever put on Mr. Gorrie’s bed. Or on mine.” Why not?
“Because-it-isn’t-good-enough.”
So I had to go and take the pillowcases off the pillows on the alcove bed and bring them out to her, and it did turn out that they were not a pair, though they had looked it to me. One was made of “good” fabric-that was hers-and the one in her hand was mine.
“I wouldn’t believe you hadn’t noticed,” she said, “if it was anybody but you.”
Chess had heard of another apartment. A real apartment, not a “suite”-it had a full bathroom and two bedrooms. A friend of his at work was leaving it, because he and his wife had bought a house. It was in a building at the corner of First Avenue and Macdonald Street. I could still walk to work, and he could take the same bus he took now. With two salaries, we could afford it.
The friend and his wife were leaving some furniture behind, which they would sell cheaply. It would not suit their new house, but to us it seemed splendid in its respectability. We walked around the bright third-story room admiring the cream-painted walls, the oak parquet, the roomy kitchen cupboards, and the tiled bathroom floor. There was even a tiny balcony looking out onto the leaves of Macdonald Park. We fell in love with each other in a new way, in love with our new status, our emergence into adult life from the basement that had been only a very temporary way station. It would be featured in our conversation as a joke, an endurance test, for years to come. Every move we made-the rented house, the first house we owned, the second house we owned, the first house in a different city-would produce this euphoric sense of progress and tighten our connection. Until the last and by far the grandest house, which I entered with inklings of disaster and the faintest premonitions of escape.
We gave our notice to Ray, without telling Mrs. Gorrie. That raised her to a new level of hostility. In fact, she went a little crazy.
“Oh, she thinks she’s so clever. She can’t even keep two rooms clean. When she sweeps the floor all she does is sweep the dirt into a corner.”
When I had bought my first broom I had forgotten to buy a dustpan, and for a time I had done that. But she could have known about it only if she let herself into our rooms with a key of her own while I was out. Which it became apparent that she had done.
“She’s a sneak, you know. I knew the first I saw of her what a sneak she was. And a liar. She isn’t right in the head. She’d sit down there and say she’s writing letters and she writes the same thing over and over again-it’s not letters, it’s the same thing over and over. She’s not right in the head.”
Now I knew that she must have uncrumpled the pages in my wastebasket. I often tried to start the same story with the same words. As she said, over and over again.
The weather had turned quite warm, and I went to work without a jacket, wearing a snug sweater tucked into my skirt, and a belt pulled to its tightest notch.
She opened the front door and yelled after me.
“Slut. Look at the slut, the way she sticks her chest out and wobbles her rear end. You think you’re Marilyn Monroe?”
And “We don’t need you in our house. The sooner you get out of here the better.”
She phoned up Ray and told him I was trying to steal her bed linen. She complained that I was telling stories about her up and down the street. She had opened the door to make sure I could hear, and she shouted into the phone, but this was hardly necessary, because we were on the same line and could listen in anytime we wanted to. I never did so-my instinct was to block my ears- but one evening when Chess was home he picked up the phone and spoke.
“Don’t pay any attention to her, Ray, she’s just a crazy old woman. I know she’s your mother, but I have to tell you she’s crazy.”
I asked him what Ray had said, whether he was angry at that. “He just said, ‘Sure, okay.’ “
Mrs. Gorrie had hung up and was shouting directly down the stairs, “I’ll tell you who’s crazy. I’ll tell you who’s a crazy liar spreading lies about me and my husband-”
Chess said, “We’re not listening to you. You leave my wife alone.” Later he said to me, “What does she mean about her and her husband?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
“She just has it in for you,” he said. “Because you’re young and nice-looking and she’s an old hag.
“Forget it,” he said, and made a halfway joke to cheer me up.
“What is the point of old women anyway?”
We moved to the new apartment by taxi with just our suitcases. We waited out on the sidewalk with our backs to the house. I expected some final screaming then, but there was not a sound.
“What if she’s got a gun and shoots me in the back?” I said.
“Don’t talk like her,” Chess said.
“I’d like to wave to Mr. Gorrie if he’s there.”
“Better not.”
I didn’t take a final look at the house, and I didn’t walk down that street, that block of Arbutus Street that faces the park and the sea, ever again. I don’t have a clear idea of what it looked like, though I remember a few things-the alcove curtain, the china cabinet, Mr. Gorrie’s green recliner-so well.
We got to know other young couples who had started out as we did, living in cheap spaces in other people’s houses. We heard about rats, cockroaches, evil toilets, crazy landladies. And we would tell about our crazy landlady. Paranoia.
Otherwise, I didn’t think of Mrs. Gorrie.
But Mr. Gorrie showed up in my dreams. In my dreams I seemed to know him before he knew her. He was agile and strong, but he wasn’t young, and he didn’t look any better than he did when I had read to him in the front room. Perhaps he could talk, but his talk was on the level of those noises I had learned to interpret-it was abrupt and peremptory, an essential but perhaps disdained footnote to the action. And the action was explosive, for these were erotic dreams. All the time that I was a young wife, and then, without undue delay, a young mother-busy, faithful, regularly satisfied-I kept having dreams now and then in which the attack, the response, the possibilities, went beyond anything life offered. And from which romance was banished. Decency as well. Our bed-Mr. Gorrie’s and mine-was the gravelly beach or the rough boat deck or the punishing coils of greasy rope. There was a relish of what you might call ugliness. His pungent smell, his jelly eye, his dog’s teeth. I woke out of these pagan dreams drained even of astonishment, or shame, and fell asleep again and woke with a memory I got used to denying in the morning. For years and years and surely long after he was dead Mr. Gorrie operated in my nightlife this way. Until I used him up, I suppose, the way we use up the dead. But it never seemed to be this way-that 1 was in charge, that I had brought him there. It seemed to be working both ways, as if he had brought me there, too, and it was his experience as much as it was mine.
And the boat and the dock and the gravel on the shore, the trees sky-pointed or crouching, leaning out over the water, the complicated profile of surrounding islands and dim yet distinct mountains, seemed to exist in a natural confusion, more extravagant and yet more ordinary than anything I could dream or invent. Like a place that will go on existing whether you are there or not, and that in fact is still there.
But I never saw the charred beams of the house fallen down on the body of the husband. That had happened a long time before and the forest had grown up all around it.
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