Lying Under the Apple Tree (43 page)

After nearly thirty years of teaching in the public schools around the county—ten years in the last school—Sam had suddenly quit and decided to get into the business of selling vegetables, full-time. He had always cultivated a big vegetable garden, and raspberry canes, in the extra lot beside their house, and they had sold their surplus produce to a few people around town. But now, apparently, this was to change into his way of making a living, selling to grocery stores and perhaps eventually putting up a market stall at the front gate.

“You’re serious about all this?” said Juliet quietly.

“Darn right I am.”

“You’re not going to miss teaching?”

“Not on your Nelly-O. I was fed up. I was fed up to the eyeballs.”

It was true that after all those years, he had never been offered, in any school, the job of principal. She supposed that was what he was fed up with. He was a remarkable teacher, the one whose antics and energy everyone would remember, his Grade Six unlike any other year in his pupils’ lives. Yet he had been passed over, time and again, and probably for that very reason. His methods could be seen to undercut authority. So you could imagine Authority saying that he was not the sort of man to be in charge, he’d do less harm where he was.

He liked outdoor work, he was good at talking to people, he would probably do well, selling vegetables.

But Sara would hate it.

Juliet did not like it either. If there was a side to be on, however, she would have to choose his. She was not going to define herself as a snob.

And the truth was that she saw herself—she saw herself and Sam and Sara, but particularly herself and Sam—as superior in their own way to everybody around them. So what should his peddling vegetables matter?

Sam spoke now in a quieter, conspiratorial voice.

“What’s her name?”

He meant the baby’s.

“Penelope. We’re never going to call her Penny. Penelope.”

“No, I mean—I mean her last name.”

“Oh. Well, it’s Henderson-Porteous I guess. Or Porteous-Henderson. But maybe that’s too much of a mouthful, when she’s already called Penelope? We knew that but we wanted Penelope. We’ll have to settle it somehow.”

“So. He’s given her his name,” Sam said. “Well, that’s something. I mean, that’s good.”

Juliet was surprised for a moment, then not.

“Of course he has,” she said. Pretending to be mystified and amused. “She’s his.”

“Oh yes. Yes. But given the circumstances.”

“I forget about the circumstances,” she said. “If you mean the fact that we’re not married, it’s hardly anything to take into account. Where we live, the people we know, it is not a thing anybody thinks about.”

“Suppose not,” said Sam. “Was he married to the first one?”

Juliet had told them about Eric’s wife, whom he had cared for during the eight years that she had lived after her car accident.

“Ann? Yes. Well, I don’t really know. But yes. I think so. Yes.”

Sara called into the front seat, “Wouldn’t it be nice to stop for ice cream?”

“We’ve got ice cream in the fridge at home,” Sam called back. And added quietly, shockingly, to Juliet, “Take her into anyplace for a treat, and she’ll put on a show.”

The windows were still down, the warm wind blew through the car. It was full summer—a season which never arrived, as far as Juliet could see, on the west coast. The hardwood trees were humped over the far edge of the fields, making blue-black caves of shade, and the crops and the meadows in front of them, under the hard sunlight, were gold and green. Vigorous young wheat and barley and corn and beans—fairly blistering your eyes.

Sara said, “What’s this conference in aid of? In the front seat? We can’t hear back here for the wind.”

Sam said, “Nothing interesting. Just asking Juliet if her fellow’s still doing the fishing.”

Eric made his living prawn fishing, and had done so for a long time. Once he had been a medical student. That had come to an end because he had performed an abortion, on a friend (not a girlfriend). All had gone well, but somehow the story got out. This was something Juliet had thought of revealing to her broad-minded parents. She had wanted, perhaps, to establish him as an educated man, not just a fisherman. But why should that matter, especially now that Sam was a vegetable man? Also, their broad-mindedness was possibly not so reliable as she had thought.

T
HERE WAS
more to be sold than fresh vegetables and berries. Jam, bottled juice, relish, were turned out in the kitchen. The first morning of Juliet’s visit, raspberry-jam making was in progress. Irene was in charge, her blouse wet with steam or sweat, sticking to her skin between the shoulder blades. Every so often she flashed a look at the television set, which had been wheeled down the back hall to the kitchen doorway, so that you had to squeeze around it to get into the room. On the screen was a children’s morning program, showing a Bullwinkle cartoon. Now and then Irene gave a loud laugh at the cartoon antics, and Juliet laughed a little, to be comradely. Of this Irene took no notice.

Counter space had to be cleared so that Juliet could boil and mash an egg for Penelope’s breakfast, and make some coffee and toast for herself. “Is that enough room?” Irene asked her, in a voice that was dubious, as if Juliet was an intruder whose demands could not be foreseen.

Close-up, you could see how many fine black hairs grew on Irene’s forearms. Some grew on her cheeks, too, just in front of her ears.

In her sidelong way she watched everything Juliet did, watched her fiddle with the knobs on the stove (not remembering at first which burners they controlled), watched her lifting the egg out of the saucepan and peeling off the shell (which stuck, this time, and came away in little bits rather than in large easy pieces), then watched her choosing the saucer to mash it in.

“You don’t want her to drop that on the floor.” This was a reference to the china saucer. “Don’t you got a plastic dish for her?”

“I’ll watch it,” Juliet said.

It turned out that Irene was a mother, too. She had a boy three years old and a daughter just under two. Their names were Trevor and Tracy. Their father had been killed last summer in an accident at the chicken barn where he worked. She herself was three years younger than Juliet—twenty-two. The information about the children and the husband came out in answer to Juliet’s questions, and the age could be figured from what she said next.

When Juliet said, “Oh, I’m sorry”—speaking about the accident and feeling that she had been rude to pry, and that it was now hypocritical of her to commiserate—Irene said, “Yeah. Right in time for my twenty-first birthday,” as if misfortunes were something to accumulate, like charms on a bracelet.

After Penelope had eaten all of the egg that she would accept, Juliet hoisted her onto one hip and carried her upstairs.

Halfway up she realized that she had not washed the saucer.

There was nowhere to leave the baby, who was not yet walking but could crawl very quickly. Certainly she could not be left for even five minutes in the kitchen, with the boiling water in the sterilizer and the hot jam and the chopping knives—it was too much to ask Irene to watch her. And first thing this morning she had again refused to make friends with Sara. So Juliet carried her up the enclosed stairs to the attic—having shut the door behind—and set her there on the steps to play, while she herself looked for the old playpen. Fortunately Penelope was an expert on steps.

The house was a full two stories tall, its rooms high-ceilinged but boxlike—or so they seemed to Juliet now. The roof was steeply pitched, so that you could walk around in the middle of the attic. Juliet used to do that, when she was a child. She walked around telling herself some story she had read, with certain additions or alterations. Dancing—that too—in front of an imaginary audience. The real audience consisted of broken or simply banished furniture, old trunks, an immensely heavy buffalo coat, the purple martin house (a present from long-ago students of Sam’s, which had failed to attract any purple martins), the German helmet supposed to have been brought home by Sam’s father from the First World War, and an unintentionally comic amateur painting of the
Empress of Ireland
sinking in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with matchstick figures flying off in all directions.

And there, leaning against the wall, was
I and the Village
. Face out—no attempt had been made to hide it. And no dust on it to speak of, so it had not been there long.

She found the playpen, after a few moments of searching. It was a handsome heavy piece of furniture, with a wooden floor and spindle sides. And the baby carriage. Her parents had kept everything, had hoped for another child. There had been one miscarriage at least. Laughter in their bed, on Sunday mornings, had made Juliet feel as if the house had been invaded by a stealthy, even shameful, disturbance, not favorable to herself.

The baby carriage was of the kind that folded down to become a stroller. This was something Juliet had forgotten about, or hadn’t known. Sweating by now, and covered with dust, she got to work to effect this transformation. This sort of job was never easy for her, she never grasped right away the manner in which things were put together, and she might have dragged the whole thing downstairs and gone out to the garden to get Sam to help her, but for the thought of Irene. Irene’s flickering pale eyes, indirect but measuring looks, competent hands. Her vigilance, in which there was something that couldn’t quite be called contempt. Juliet didn’t know what it could be called. An attitude, indifferent but uncompromising, like a cat’s.

She managed at last to get the stroller into shape. It was cumbersome, half again as big as the stroller she was used to. And filthy, of course. As she was herself by now, and Penelope, on the steps, even more so. And right beside the baby’s hand was something Juliet hadn’t even noticed. A nail. The sort of thing you paid no attention to, till you had a baby at the hand-to-mouth stage, and that you had then to be on the lookout for all the time.

And she hadn’t been. Everything here distracted her. The heat, Irene, the things that were familiar and the things that were unfamiliar.

I and the Village
.

“O
H
,”
SAID
Sara. “I hoped you wouldn’t notice. Don’t take it to heart.”

The sunroom was now Sara’s bedroom. Bamboo shades had been hung on all the windows, filling the small room—once part of the verandah—with a brownish-yellow light and a uniform heat. Sara, however, was wearing woolly pink pajamas. Yesterday, at the station, with her pencilled eyebrows and raspberry lipstick, her turban and suit, she had looked to Juliet like an elderly Frenchwoman (not that Juliet had seen many elderly Frenchwomen), but now, with her white hair flying out in wisps, her bright eyes anxious under nearly nonexistent brows, she looked more like an oddly aged child. She was sitting up against the pillows with the quilts pulled up to her waist. When Juliet had walked her to the bathroom, earlier, it had been revealed that in spite of the heat she was wearing both socks and slippers in bed.

A straight-backed chair had been placed by her bed, its seat being easier for her to reach than a table. On it were pills and medicines, talcum powder, moisturizing lotion, a half-drunk cup of milky tea, a glass filmed with the traces of some dark tonic, probably iron. On top of the bed were magazines—old copies of
Vogue
and the
Ladies’ Home Journal
.

“I’m not,” said Juliet.

“We did have it hanging up. It was in the back hall by the dining-room door. Then Daddy took it down.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say anything about it to me. He didn’t say that he was going to. Then came a day when it was just gone.”

“Why would he take it down?”

“Oh. It would be some notion he had, you know.”

“What sort of a notion?”

“Oh. I think—you know, I think it probably had to do with Irene. That it would disturb Irene.”

“There wasn’t anybody naked in it. Not like the Botticelli.”

For indeed there was a print of
The Birth of Venus
hanging in Sam and Sara’s living room. It had been the subject of nervous jokes years ago on the occasion when they had the other teachers to supper.

“No. But it was
modern
. I think it made Daddy uncomfortable. Or maybe looking at it with Irene looking at it—that made him uncomfortable. He might be afraid it would make her feel—oh, sort of contemptuous of us. You know—that we were weird. He wouldn’t like for Irene to think we were that kind of people.”

Juliet said, “The kind of people who would hang that kind of picture? You mean he’d care so much what she thought of our
pictures
?”

“You know Daddy.”

“He’s not afraid to disagree with people. Wasn’t that the trouble in his job?”

“What?” said Sara. “Oh. Yes. He can disagree. But he’s careful sometimes. And Irene. Irene is—he’s careful of her. She’s very valuable to us, Irene.”

“Did he think she’d quit her job because she thought we had a weird picture?”

“I would have left it up, dear. I value anything that comes from you. But Daddy …”

Juliet said nothing. From the time when she was nine or ten until she was perhaps fourteen, she and Sara had an understanding about Sam.
You know Daddy
.

That was the time of their being women together. Home permanents were tried on Juliet’s stubborn fine hair, dressmaking sessions produced the outfits like nobody else’s, suppers were peanut-butter-and-tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches on the evenings Sam stayed late for a school meeting. Stories were told and retold about Sara’s old boyfriends and girlfriends, the jokes they played and the fun they had, in the days when Sara was a schoolteacher too, before her heart got too bad. Stories from the time before that, when she lay in bed with rheumatic fever and had the imaginary friends Rollo and Maxine who solved mysteries, even murders, like the characters in certain children’s books. Glimpses of Sam’s besotted courtship, disasters with the borrowed car, the time he showed up at Sara’s door disguised as a tramp.