“You all set to go into nursing school?” he asked. Then when I told him about it, he said, “I don't know. It doesn't seem right. Here it is September, and for the first time you're not going back to school.”
As soon as I decently could, I went over to see Helga. She was preparing several large salmon for smoking. Hurrying over to me at once, skinny scratched legs showing beneath a gunny sack apron, her brown face broke into a smile.
I put my arms around her and cried, and so did she. It sounded rusty, as if she hadn't cried for years and years.
Then we walked to the house where she made a pot of coffee, and while we were waiting for it, she brought out a tissue-wrapped parcel. It held a white cardigan sweater.
“For when you are being a nurse,” she told me, holding it up against me to measure the length. It is a beautiful sweater, of the finest white wool and every stitch perfect.
“Oh, Helga,” I said, “thank you! It's the most beautiful sweater I've ever seen.”
“Yah,” she said matter-of-factly. “Is good. I make pattern from my own head. How long you stay?”
“Three days.”
“Will be finished. Yah, you take it back when you go.”
*Â Â *Â Â *
I hadn't been back in Vancouver for more than a week when Mrs. Williams came rapping at my door early one morning.
“Uhhh?” I managed through the fog of waking up.
“Your mother's here,” she said. “I'm giving her a cup of tea in the kitchen. Come on, love, wake up!”
My mother! I looked around my room with a groan. It was a mess. Clothes everywhere. I kicked some shoes under the bed and hastily straightened the covers and bedspread.
My mother and Mrs. Williams were having a good chat. You'd think they had known each other for years. I filled a bowl with cornflakes, found an orange and sat down with them. But I was still blurred with sleep and had trouble following their conversation. It lapped around me like water.
“So what do you think of that, Sheila?” Mrs. Williams' voice brought me back.
“Sorryâ”
“Your mother selling her piano so that you'll have the money for the tuition fee to nursing school.”
Both my mother and Mrs. Williams were smiling happily. They looked at me, waiting for my response.
“I wish...I wish you hadn't done that,” I said, trying to sound more gracious than I felt.
“It's done,” my mother answered. “I thought you'd be happy about this. She's like her father that way,” she explained to Mrs. Williams. “I did and did for that man and never a word of gratitude.”
“It's not that, Mom! It's that the piano means so much to you!”
It was more than that. Having successfully interfered between Nels and me, how dared she interfere again in my life! Did she think that this would make up for what had happened?
“Besides, it's too late to get into the September class now. It starts in a week. Registration's closed. They'll be filled up.”
“People drop out at the last minute. Why don't you phone them and find out?”
I thought I might as well go through the motions to please her. I dialed the nursing school, asked for the Director of Nursing, and explained the situation.
“You are in luck!” The voice was clear, professional. It came over the receiver loud enough for both my mother and Mrs. Williams to hear. They sat up, alert, and looked pleased with themselves.
“I've just this minute put down the phone,” went on the Director of Nursing, “and one of the applicants has decided to go on to university instead. Now just let me check your application in the January file. Oh, yes, here it is.
Sheila Brary. Yes, well, your marks are excellent. No problem there. Do you think you could get three letters of recommendation by Friday...”
My mother left soon afterwards.
“I have some shopping to do before I catch the evening boat home,” she explained. Then she counted out the hundred and ten dollars for the tuition. It was all in small bills, and she smoothed each one out carefully.
After she'd gone and Mrs. Williams and I were washing up the few dishes, Mrs. Williams turned to me.
“She's a wonderful mother to have made that sacrifice for you.”
*Â Â *Â Â *
Before going in training, I made one more trip to the Landing to get the three letters of recommendation.
Now, in the middle of September, the Snow apples were ripeâhuge, juicy, delicious. Red on the outside; inside their whiteness was veined with red. As I bit into one, the sharp, sweet, tangy taste seemed to me to capture the essence of the Landingâunique and beautiful.
One letter of recommendation was given to me by the school principal. The second one I got from the priest who has been newly appointed to the peninsula and who gave it to me not because he knows I have a good character but because he knows my mother has, and the third one was from Dr. Howard.
My mother seemed glad to see me. I found out that part
of her good spirits was due to news she had. William Mann, her correspondence course instructor in Victoria, had sent her the addresses of two or three poetry magazines and had suggested she send some of her own poems to them.
She had sold two of them to
Fiddlehead
.
“I didn't know you write poetry, Mom!”
“I used to. Before I met your father. Anyway, it was one of the assignments in the correspondence course.”
“They must be good to be published.”
“I have an idea for a children's story that I want to try out. Mr. Mann said he would check it over for me when I finished, if I wanted him to.”
She looked happier and more alive than I'd ever seen her.
When I left on the boat for Vancouver, Tom saw me off. It's something he never did ordinarily.
“Just imagine, Tom. I'm going back to school after all. Though I still wish Mom hadn't sold the piano to pay my tuition.” The boat sounded its warning whistle.
Tom looked hard at me.
“Is that why you haven't said anything to me? Not even thanks?”
“What are you talking about?”
Tom was slow to answer.
“I gave Mom the money to give to you. She sold the piano afterwards. It had nothing to do with you. She must have told you!”
“No.” I could hardly believe what he was telling me. They were beginning to pull in the gangplank. I had to run.
“I'll write, Tom!” I stayed out on deck until I could no longer see his bright red sweater on the pier.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Nothing is simple, it seems. And no one can be completely understood. I think of my father and mother and their secrets.
Am I any different, really? Already I have secrets of my own, for no one else to know.
Maybe everyone has a secret. Maybe in this aloneness, everyone is the same.
When Mary Razzell's three children were in high school, she took a night school writing course offered by the Vancouver School Board and sold an article written in that class. Encouraged, she became a part-time student at the University of British Columbia and, in a tutorial with Carol Shields, wrote an adult novel, which was later rewritten as the young adult novel,
Snow Apples
.
Mary has a broad working background as a nurse, and she taught prenatal classes at Grace Hospital in Vancouver until her retirement in the 1990s. She is currently a third-year English major at the University of British Columbia.
Mary Razzell is the author of several young adult novels, including
Salmonberry Wine
(nominated for a B.C. Book Prize and the Geoffrey Bilson Award) and
White Wave
(also nominated for a B.C. Book Prize).
Snow Apples
, her first novel, was nominated for a Governor General's Award when it was first published in 1984. She has homes in Vancouver and on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast.