Dear Life: Stories (27 page)

It was dark when she went out to start her car, and she couldn’t get it going. She tried again and again and the engine made a willing noise, then stopped. When Franklin came into the yard and couldn’t get past it I hurried to tell him the trouble. She got out of the driver’s seat when she saw him coming, and began to explain, saying it had been acting up on her like the devil lately.

He tried to get it going, while we stood by his truck, out of the way. He couldn’t manage it either. He went inside to call the garage in the village. She didn’t want to go in again, though it was cold out. The presence of the man of
the house seemed to have made her reticent. I waited with her. He came to the door to call to us that the garage was closed.

There was nothing to do then but ask her to stay for supper, and overnight. She was immensely apologetic, then more comfortable, once she got sitting down with a new cigarette. I started taking things out for the meal. Franklin was off changing his clothes. I asked her if she wanted to phone whoever was at her house.

She said, yes, she better.

I was thinking that she might have somebody there who could come take her home. I wasn’t looking forward to talking all evening with Franklin sitting listening. Of course he could go to his own room—he wouldn’t call it his study—but I would feel that this banishment was my fault. Also we would want to watch the news, and she would want to talk through it. Even my brightest women friends did that, and he hated it.

Or she might sit quiet and strangely bewildered. Just as bad.

There seemed to be nobody answering. So she called the people next door—that was where the children were—and there was a great deal of apologetic laughing, then a talk with the children to urge them to be good, then more assurances and heartfelt thanks to the people who would be keeping them. Though it turned out that those friends had somewhere to go tomorrow so that the children would have to go with them, and it was really not so handy after all.

Franklin was coming back into the kitchen just as she hung up the phone. She turned to me and said that they might have made up stuff about going out, that was what
they were like. Never mind all the favors she had done for them when they needed it.

Both she and Franklin then were struck at the same time.

“Oh my Lord,” said Gwen.

“No it isn’t,” said Franklin. “It’s just me.”

And they stood halted in their tracks. How could they have missed it, they said. Realizing, I supposed, that it would not do to spread their arms and fall upon each other. Instead, they made some strange disconnected movements, as if they had to look all around them in order to be sure this was reality. Also repeating each other’s names in tones of some mockery and dismay. Not the names I would have expected them to say either.

“Frank.”

“Dolly.”

After a moment I realized that Gwen, Gwendolyn, could indeed be teased into Dolly.

And any young man would rather be called Frank than Franklin.

They did not forget about me, or Franklin didn’t, except for that one moment.

“You’ve heard me mention Dolly?”

His voice insisted on our going back to normal, while Dolly’s or Gwen’s voice insisted on the enormous or even supernatural joke of their finding each other.

“I can’t tell you the last time when I ever heard myself called that. Not anybody else in the world that knows me by that name. Dolly.”

The odd thing now was that I began to participate in the general merriment. For wonder would have to be changed into merriment before my eyes, and that was happening.
The whole discovery had to take that quick turn. And so eager was I apparently to do my share that I produced a bottle of wine.

Franklin does not drink anymore. He never drank much, then quietly gave it up altogether. So it was up to Gwen and myself to chatter and explain, in our newly discovered high spirits, and to keep remarking on the coincidence of things.

She told me that she had been a nursemaid when she knew Franklin. She had been working in Toronto, looking after two little English children whose parents had sent them out to Canada so that they could miss the war. There was other help in the house so she got most of her evenings off and she would go out to have a good time, as what young girl wouldn’t? She met Franklin when he was on his last leave before going overseas and they had as crazy a time as you could imagine. He might have written her a letter or two, but she was just too busy for letters. Then when the war was over she got on a boat as soon as possible to transport the English children home and she met a man on that boat whom she married.

But it didn’t last, England was so dreary after the war that she thought she would die, so she came on home.

That was a part of her life I didn’t already know about. But I did know about her two weeks with Franklin, and so, as I have said, did many others. At least if they read poetry. They knew how lavish she was with her love, but they didn’t know as I did how she believed that she couldn’t get pregnant because she had been a twin and wore her dead sis’s hair in a locket around her neck. She had all kinds of notions like that and gave Franklin a magic tooth—he didn’t know
whose—to keep him safe when he left to go overseas. He managed to lose it right away, but his life was spared.

She had a rule also that if she stepped off a curb on the wrong foot the whole day would go bad for her, and so they would have to go back and do it again. Her rules enthralled him.

To tell the truth I was privately un-enthralled when told this. I had thought how men are charmed by stubborn quirks if the girl is good-looking enough. Of course that has gone out of fashion. At least I hope it has. All that delight in the infantile female brain. (When I first went teaching they told me there was a time, not long ago, when women never taught mathematics. Weakness of intellect prevented it.)

Of course that girl, that charmer I had badgered him into telling me about, might be generally made up. She might be anybody’s creation. But I did not think so. She was her own sassy choice. She’d loved herself so thoroughly.

Naturally I kept my mouth shut about what he’d told me and what had gone into the poem. And Franklin remained quiet about that most of the time too, except to say something about what Toronto was like in those teeming war days, about the stupid liquor laws or the farce of the Church Parade. If I had thought at this point that he might make her a gift of any of his writing, it seemed I was mistaken.

He got tired and went to bed. Gwen or Dolly and I made up her bed on the couch. She sat on the side of it with her last cigarette, telling me not to worry, she was not going to burn the house down, she never lay down till it was finished.

Our room was cold, the windows opened much wider than usual. Franklin was asleep. He was really asleep, I could always tell if he was shamming.

I hate going to sleep knowing there are dirty dishes on the table, but I had felt suddenly too tired to do them with Gwen helping as I knew she would. I meant to get up early in the morning to clear things away.

But I woke to full daylight and a clatter in the kitchen and the smell of breakfast as well as the smell of cigarettes. Conversation too, and it was Franklin talking when I would have expected Gwen. I heard her laughing at whatever he said. I got up at once and hurried into my clothes and fixed my hair, a thing I never usually bother with so early.

All the safety and merriment of the evening was gone from me. I made a good deal of noise coming down the stairs.

Gwen was at the sink with a row of sparkling clean glass jars on the draining board.

“Done the dishes all by hand because I was scared I wouldn’t get the hang of your dishwasher,” she said. “Then I got hold of these jars up there and I thought I might as well do them while I was at it.”

“They haven’t been washed in a century,” I said.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

Franklin said he’d gone out and tried the car again, but no go. He had got hold of the garage though, and they’d said that somebody could come up and look at it this afternoon. But he thought instead of waiting around he’d tow the car down there and they could get at it this morning.

“Gives Gwen a chance to get at the rest of the kitchen,” I said, but neither one was interested in my joke. He said no, Gwen had better go with him, they’d want to talk to her since it was her car.

I noticed that he had a little trouble saying the name Gwen, having to push aside Dolly.

I said I had been joking.

He asked if he could make me any breakfast and I said no.

“How she keeps her figure,” Gwen said. And somehow even this compliment turned into a thing they could laugh at together.

Neither gave any sign of knowing how I felt, though it seemed to me I was behaving oddly, with every remark I made coming out like some brittle kind of mockery. They are so full of themselves, I thought. It was an expression that came from I don’t know where. When Franklin went out to prepare the car to be towed she followed, as if she didn’t want to lose sight of him for a moment.

As she left she called back that she could never thank me enough.

Franklin tooted the horn to wish me good-bye, a thing he never did normally.

I wanted to run after them, pound them to pieces. I walked up and down as this grievous excitement got more and more of a hold on me. There was no doubt at all about what I should do.

In a fairly short time I went out and got into my car, having dropped my house key through the slot in the front door. I had a suitcase beside me, though I had already more or less forgotten what I’d put in it. I had written a terse note saying that I had to check some facts about Martha Ostenso and then I started to write a longer note which I intended to address to Franklin but did not want Gwen to see when she came back with him as she surely would. It said that he must be free to do as he wished and that the only thing that was unbearable to me was the deception or perhaps it was self-deception. There was nothing for it but for him to admit
what he wanted. It was ridiculous and cruel to make me watch it and so I would just get out of the way.

I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough. And so on, a berating that became in even so short a space somewhat repetitive and rambling and more and more without dignity or grace. I understood now that it would have to be rewritten before I could let it go to Franklin so I had to take it with me and send it through the mail.

At the end of our driveway I turned in the other direction from the village and the garage, and in no time, as it seemed, I was driving east on a major highway. Where was I going? If I didn’t make up my mind soon I was going to find myself in Toronto, and it seemed to me that far from getting into a hiding place there I was bound to run into places and people all tied up with my former happiness, and Franklin.

To keep this from happening I turned and headed for Cobourg. A town that we had never been in together.

It wasn’t even noon yet. I got a room in a downtown motel. I passed the maids who were cleaning up the rooms that had been occupied last night. My room, having been unoccupied, was very cold. I turned the heat on and decided to go for a walk. Then when I opened the door I couldn’t do it. I was shivering and shaking. I locked the door and got into bed with all my clothes on and I still shook so I pulled the covers up to my ears.

When I woke up it was well into a bright afternoon and my clothes were plastered to me with sweat. I turned the heat off and found a few clothes in the suitcase, which I
changed into, and I went out. I walked very fast. I was hungry but felt that I could never slow down, or sit down, to eat.

What had happened to me was not uncommon, I thought. Not in books or in life. There should be, there must be, some well-worn way of dealing with it. Walking like this, of course. But you had to stop, even in a town this size you have to stop for cars and red lights. Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence. Everywhere an insult in your face.

As the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed it, more of life.

Where the shops finally did peter out there were some cabins. Empty, boards nailed across their windows, waiting to be demolished. Where people used to stay on humbler holidays, before the motels. And then I remembered that I too had stayed there. Yes, in one of those places when they were reduced—maybe it was the off-season—reduced to taking in afternoon sinners and I had been one of them. I was still a student teacher and I would not even have remembered that it was in this town if it wasn’t for something about those now boarded-up cabins. The man a teacher, older. A wife at home, undoubtedly children. Lives to be tampered with. She mustn’t know, it would break her heart. I didn’t care in the least. Let it break.

I could remember more if I tried, but it wasn’t worth it. Except that it slowed me down to a more normal pace and turned me back towards the motel. And there on the dresser
was the letter I’d written. Sealed but without a stamp. I went out again, found the post office, bought a stamp, dropped the envelope where it should go. Hardly any thought and no misgiving. I could have left it on the table, what did it matter? All is over.

On the walk I had noticed a restaurant, down some steps. I found it again, and looked at the posted menu.

Franklin did not like eating out. I did. I walked some more, at a normal pace this time, waiting for the place to open. I saw a scarf I liked in a window, and I thought that I should go in and buy it, that it would be good for me. But when I picked it up I had to drop it. Its silky feel made me sick.

In the restaurant I drank wine and waited a long time for my food. There was hardly anybody there—they were just setting up the band for the evening. I went into the washroom and was surprised how much like myself I looked. I wondered if it was possible that some man—some old man—would ever think of picking me up. The idea was grotesque—not because of his possible age but because there could be no thought in my head of any man but Franklin, ever.