The Romantic Read online

  Mrs. Carver rapidly wipes her hands on her apron, which I take for a raided “Yes, I realize that and I’m not happy about it but I’m only trying to cheer the place up.” Then she dashes back into the kitchen.

  During my mother’s reign I was tidy so as not to trigger a sarcastic remark. Now my fear is that I will be adding to Mrs. Carver’s seemingly countless worries. Which isn’t a very prohibitive fear. As I never did before, I leave things out on my dresser—a deck of cards, a pack of crayons. When I play with my dolls, I don’t just dress them, comb their hair and put them back in the toy box, I carry them around, sit them in front of the television. I eat my lunch in front of the television and Mrs. Carver frets only if I neglect to use a plate, and even then I am given an opportunity to perceive that she frets (by her sharp intake of breath or her hands rubbing together) and to go and get the plate myself before she scurries into the kitchen to get it for me.

  My father, who sees her for no more than a few minutes a day, keeps trying to engage her in conversation. I berate him afterwards and he looks stricken and says he’s just being civil, for Pete’s sake. But he is touched by her, it’s hard not to be. He helps her on with her threadbare twill coat. From the front door he watches her drive off in her hulking old Ford and wonders how she can see over the steering wheel.

  And then, the very next afternoon, he greets her with, “What’s for supper, Mrs. Carver?” and she rolls her eyes behind her glasses and whispers: “Pork chops, peas, potatoes” (for instance), and he says,“How’s that?” and she tries again: “Pork chops, peas, potatoes,” which he still doesn’t hear. Or he does and blithely goes on to ask what kind of potatoes, and I am driven to intervene.

  “Scalloped potatoes,” I hurl at him,“grilled pork chops, boiled frozen peas, okay?”

  “Fine,” he says sheepishly. “Sounds delicious.”

  I translate her gestures as well. In no time, I have figured out how to read her twitches and flutters. I attribute my success to the investigative techniques I picked up from Aunt Verna, who told me such things as: liars rub their noses and blink either too much or too little; people who aren’t lying outright, but nevertheless have something to hide, rub their chins and look to the left. Watch the eyes, the mouth and the hands, Aunt Verna advised. I do, and it is clear to me that Mrs. Carver is both honest and full of secrets.

  I have also concluded that she is afraid of dying of a heart attack from the shock of a loud noise, which is how her husband died. If I drop a spoon or slam a drawer, she clutches her chest, and she is constantly on high alert for a knock at the front door, even though knocks are rare and—on the odd occasion that they do materialize—brief, because in her canine way she has already heard the footsteps and has dashed down to the landing, whipped open the door and startled somebody into a silence she won’t be the one to break. Other kinds of sharp sounds have her dashing to a window. If what she sees excites her, she’ll hiss and wave me over, and we peer out like captives or spies.

  Often the exciting thing is only a dog, or one of the Dingwall boys. “Only” to the uninformed observer. To Mrs. Carver, who knows about omens, somebody’s black dog on your property is bad luck. A yellow dog is good luck, as is anything yellow: a yellow bird, the sight of a person in a yellow coat or hat, a yellow car going by. A yellow car with a licence plate that has one or more threes in it is an especially good sign—three, not seven, being the lucky number. There are signs almost everywhere you look. At the good ones Mrs. Carver smiles—the only time she does smile—and you get a glimpse of the dimples and straight white teeth that must have attracted her husband.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Thanks to Mrs. Carver I know about the Richters from the day they arrive. One Thursday afternoon in early December, coming home from a meeting of the Smart Set Club, I find Mrs. Carver in her coat out on the front walk. She points, and I turn and see, parked down the street, a big yellow van into which three men in yellow overalls have just disappeared. “Holy cow,” I say at so much good luck. A mirror-fronted cabinet emerges from the van and coasts above a hedge that hides the men from view. The mirror is like a fallen sheet of sky, just hanging there, just floating along on its own.

  “The O’Hearns must have moved,” I say. Immersed as I’d been in my current serial daydream (which has me as a beautiful Egyptian princess and the members of the Smart Set Club as my slaves), I’d failed to notice the van.

  “Oh!” gasps Mrs. Carver. The setting sun is caught in the mirror.

  “It’s like an orange,” I say. A moment later the orange bursts and then vanishes as the cabinet reaches the end of the hedge and the men beneath reappear.

  I look at Mrs. Carver, who, as you’d expect, is smiling. “They’ll be nice people,” I say about the new neighbours as I try to imagine how the good luck will reveal itself.

  Mrs. Carver nods deeply.

  “Very nice,” I say.

  The next afternoon, I come home from school to an unprecedented event: neighbours inside the house, and one of them—Mrs. Dingwall—being somebody my mother swore would cross our threshold over her dead body. The other two are Mrs. Dingwall’s four-year-old twins, Gord and Ward, whom I find lying on our living-room floor in front of the blaring television. I cross the room and turn the volume down and they gaze up without expression. Because they are prone to such wordless stares and because they have no eyebrows, I’m not convinced they’re sane. ‘You don’t want to go deaf,” I say, but it’s poor Mrs. Carver I’m thinking of.

  Now I can hear Mrs. Dingwall’s voice rolling out of the kitchen. “Oh,” she sighs when I enter and say hello. “Here’s Louise.” She gives me a few slow blinks. Her eyes are the same watered-down gold as the twins’, ginger-ale-coloured eyes, but unlike the boys’ they reach out to you, her entire round face reaches out, sloshed in gloom and craving. She has on one of her husband’s old shirts over those baggy red slacks of hers, which my mother used to call clown pants and said Mrs. Dingwall should be shot for even owning let alone wearing outside the house.

  I go to the other side of the table, where Mrs. Carver sits very straight in her chair and furiously kneads the red food-colouring bud in a bag of margarine while ogling the disaster of crumbs, sugar and spilled milk surrounding Mrs. Dingwall’s coffee cup. Two lemon cookies are left in the tin, which was full at lunch. I ask if I might have one.

  “Help yourself,” answers Mrs. Dingwall. “I just came over for a little visit with Mrs. Harver here.”

  “Carver,” I say.

  “Carver? Oh. Well, that’s me for you, deaf as a post on account of the drops I used to take for my ear infections. If it isn’t one darn thing it’s another. With this cold weather, it’s my lungs acting up.” She produces a cough. “Anyways, I was just asking what your dad might have told you about the people who bought the O’Hearns’ place.”

  “Why would he know anything?”

  “According to Mr. Dingwall …” She glances at Mrs. Carver. “That’s my husband of going on nineteen years. Bill. Anyways, he says that where your dad works they drew up the whatchamacallits, the mortgage papers.”

  Mr. Dingwall is a clerk for the government, and the nature of his job occasionally brings him into my father’s law office.

  “He worked late last night,” I say about my father. “I’d already gone to bed by the time he got home.”

  “They moved in yesterday. You must have seen the van. I was laid up all day with my bad chest, missed the whole thing. All’s I know is what Dora O’Hearn told me, and she only met them the one time. They’re German, you know. Came here after the war, so that’s going on fifteen years, but they still have those heavy accents. Dora could hardly understand a word the woman said. Greta, that’s her name. That’s the woman’s name. He’s Karl. Greta and Karl Richter. I suppose that sounds German, although I know a Greta from Strathroy, where I grew up, and there’s a Karl at church, Karl Stock, he’s an elder, and neither of them are German. I never met a Richter that I can recall. I said to Bill, I
said, how do we know they’re not Nazis? and he says, how do we know they didn’t fight in the Resistance? Bill always looks on the bright side. They’ve only got the one boy and he’s adopted.”

  I perk up. “Adopted?”

  “And around your age, Louise, which threw me for a loop when Bill told me, considering as how they’re old enough to be the grandparents. I’d go over, welcome them to the neighbourhood and all, but if they say Heil Hitler I’ll keel over dead.”

  “I’ve never met anybody who was adopted,” I say.

  “Probably couldn’t have her own babies for one reason or another.” She turns to Mrs. Carver. “I don’t know if you heard, but I lost a baby, it’ll be four years come Valentine’s Day. The doctors said it was because I was run ragged. I’m lucky to be alive.” She presses her palms into her eyes.

  Before I understand that she is crying, Mrs. Carver is out of her chair. She hurries around the table and pats Mrs. Dingwall’s bouncing shoulders. “Should I get a Kleenex?” I ask. No response. I look at the calendar—it’s thumbtacked to the wall beside the phone—and realize that yesterday, December eighth, was the anniversary of my conception. Feeling entitled, I take the last cookie.

  It is Mrs. Carver who moves me, with her twitching face and her fast pats that I doubt can be very comforting. For Mrs. Dingwall I feel only exasperation. I nibble the edges of the cookie and look at her chewed-to-the-quick fingernails, the dirt in the creases of her knuckles, and feel a pure, ruthless disgust for the tragedies of adults. The mess they make of things.

  The following morning, instead of waking up anxious, as I almost always do, I wake up happy. I review the events of the previous day to come up with a reason, but there isn’t one. It’s a strange, hollow happiness, almost unbearable. Joy, I think. Maybe what this feeling is, is joy.

  I look at my bedside clock. Eight-fifteen. That isn’t my father shovelling, then, so early on a Saturday morning. I get up and draw back the curtains. The glass is frosted over. With my thumbnail I try to clear a spot, but the frost is too thick, so I undo the clasp and crank the window open.

  Snow lies like a pelt over everything. Cars, shrubs, hedges. The only tracks—and they cut across our property a couple of yards from the window—were made by a person walking over everyone’s lawn, straight through the drifts. Who? The shoveller is Mr. Parker, across the road. In all the whiteness his red cap is a gash. “Day is breaking,” I think, equating this fracturing event with the rasping sound of his shovel.

  Even happier now because of the snow, I go to the closet and get my bathrobe and mule slippers. The bathrobe is the same style and colour as the one hanging in my mother’s closet, and whenever I put mine on I remember how my mother agonized over whether we should buy the champagne or the cornflower blue. We ended up with the champagne because it matched her hair. “The blue matches your eyes,” I pointed out and was told, coldly, that her eyes are delft.

  I open the bedroom door, tiptoe down the hall. In front of my father’s door I listen. His quiet snores remind me of men on television breathing through skin-diving nozzles or gas masks. I would like to burst in and tell him about the snowfall but I have never entered my parents’ room when the door was shut, and now that my mother has left and I know my father misses her laugh, I’m afraid of finding him in some unimaginable grief-ridden condition.

  I keep going, down to the bathroom where, after using the toilet and washing my hands and face, I brush my hair with my mother’s glass-handled brush. I then apply a drop of her baby oil under each of my eyes and rub Jergens lotion into my elbows. I tell myself I am fighting wrinkles (according to my mother, I have the kind of thin skin that is prone to premature aging), but my mind is on the transgression, which I would never commit if I thought my mother might catch me and so, because I do commit it, I feel that there can be no possibility of her coming back. I am closing the lid on her coffin. Bang. (Although I don’t think of her as dead.) I sometimes consider wearing her perfume and her scarves, except there is still my father to contend with, his incurable hopes.

  A few minutes later I go down to the front hall and manage to shove the door open against a bank of snow. Just as I’d thought, there’s no newspaper or milk bottle; I’d have seen the footprints of anybody who had walked up the drive. But it has become my morning routine to fetch the milk and paper and then to pour out two glasses of orange juice. On weekday mornings I percolate a pot of coffee for my father, but on Saturdays and Sundays, because he sleeps late, I don’t bother.

  I drink my juice, standing at the kitchen window. All the junk on the Dingwalls’ lawn is buried, the broken tricycles and chairs. You can’t even see the picket fence between our yards. There is no private property today, there are no eyesores. Under parcels of snow our four cedar trees bow down in postures reminiscent of Aunt Verna carrying her steamer trunk. When she said goodbye to me, the night before she went back to Texas, I drew away from kissing her, but only because I wasn’t used to kissing people, and she said,“Oh, I know you’re cross with me for leaving!” and her eyes reddened. I think of Mrs. Dingwall crying and of the German family—the Richters. I decide to walk by their place after breakfast.

  By the time I am getting ready to go out, my father is up and stalking from window to window, flourishing a putty knife. “How will the fire trucks get through?” he exclaims. “The ambulances?” With the knife he takes swipes at the frost. “Don’t have a brain seizure, Louise! Don’t burst your appendix!”

  “I won’t,” I say, getting into my snowsuit. He hasn’t been this chipper since before my mother left.

  “If you do, I’ll be forced to operate!” Bathrobe billowing, hair on end, he flies down to the landing and scrapes at the long window next to the door.

  “Could you?” I ask, surprised.

  He considers. “I’d have to consult my atlas of human anatomy. Sharpen the paring knife.” He presses his forehead against the pane. “Virgin snow,” he says. “Pristine.”

  “Somebody walked on our lawn.”

  He scrapes a bigger clearing.

  I say,“It was the German boy, I’ll bet.”

  We discussed the Richters last evening. Mrs. Dingwall was right about their lawyer being somebody my father knows, a man from his office. Six years ago, my father him self was involved in drawing up the papers for the adoption of the boy, whose name he couldn’t remember. What he did remember was how the Richters had wanted a baby girl, having lost their own baby girl ten years earlier, but at a church orphanage they found themselves taken with a boy, and not a baby either, a three-year-old. Which was better all around, my father felt. He said it would have been hard for people the Richters’ age to get a healthy newborn.

  “Abelard,” he says now. “That’s his name. Abelard.”

  I leave the house and plough my way to the trail of footprints. Once I’m in them, walking is easy enough. Everywhere, people have started shovelling. The older set of Dingwall twins, Larry and Jerry, are on the roof of their carport, heaving off shovelfuls of snow from each side and in time with each other so that what I see are white wings opening as the snow is thrown, folding as it drops. Behind them the sky is such a clear blue I feel drawn upwards, as a blue lake can draw you.

  Sure enough, the footprints lead me to the O’Hearns’ house. The Richters’ house now. And there they are, Mr. Richter and the boy. Abelard. I own an old book, which was my father’s when he was my age, called Peoples of the World, and consequently I am surprised that the two of them aren’t wearing the short leather pants, suspenders and little Robin Hood hats that the father and son in the book have on. Abelard is dressed like any boy: blue jeans, brown jacket, brown cap. Mr. Richter, in a long black coat and black fedora, looks like a judge.

  I move along to the Gorys’ property, directly across the road, where I hope I’ll be anonymous among a gang of little girls tobogganing down a drift. Abelard does the shovelling, strong, fast throws. Mr. Richter sweeps what is left behind. The thought enters my mind that the Richters
adopted a boy so he could do the hard labour around the house, and it is just then, as I’m feeling sorry for him, that Mrs. Richter comes out the front door.

  Although she is dressed nothing like the German wife in my book, she is nevertheless very foreign looking, very dramatic. Big for a woman, much bigger than her husband, and wearing a red-and-orange skirt and red shawl. No coat or gloves. It takes me a moment to realize that her hair, braided and twined several times around her head, isn’t a brown hat. She carries a tray holding two steaming glasses, and Mr. Richter and Abelard stop work and each take one. She sets the tray on the porch wall. Abelard removes his cap, he’s hot, and she ruffles his hair, which is the same dark brown as hers. While he and his father drink, she does a little dance step and swirls her skirt. She points to the pattern her feet have made in a dusting of snow, and there is a discussion, in German supposedly (over the screaming of the little girls I can’t catch any words) regarding these patterns. Abelard puts his glass on the tray and stamps out his own pattern. Mrs. Richter wraps him in her shawl and they embrace before she unspools him. At what he says next she claps her hands and throws back her head, and then she breaks into song: “La, la, la, la, la, la, la.” This I clearly hear. So do the little girls, who go silent. She sounds like a lady on the radio. She sings the same phrase again, no words, only,“La, la, la, la, la, la, la.” Abelard glances in my direction. He puts his cap back on and picks up the shovel. Behind me the children resume screaming and clambering up the drift.

  Mrs. Richter turns. She opens her arms at all the snow, and then she turns again and seems to be including in her delight the little girls, and me as well. In a burst of feeling, a kind of anguish, I smile back.