Authors: Julie Johnston
Little Red Lies (14 page)
“Huh?”
“Sure. You saved the day for everybody. All the other actors. Everybody worked hard on that play and they all had a chance to shine, even though I broke my stupid ankle and nearly spoiled it all. It could have been such a disaster.”
“Oh.”
I hadn’t really thought in terms of the other actors. My long-awaited chance to act was foremost in my mind. It was my personal failure that made me so embarrassed.
Before I can say anything else, the door creaks slowly open. Hazel’s mother, in an elegant royal blue dressing gown, face heavily lined, golden curls cascading down her back, drifts into the room.
Hazel’s face freezes. I sit up straight, cross my ankles,
and watch her mother open a drawer in a cabinet and paw through it. She finds whatever she’s looking for and hides it in her sleeve before slamming the drawer shut. She doesn’t look once in our direction, but wordlessly wafts out again. What is she concealing? A murder weapon, very likely. A jewel-handled dagger. Even a long, sharply pointed ice pick would not surprise me.
“Sorry,” Hazel says. “My mother is not very well.” Embarrassed, she looks at the floor, at her cast, wiggles her toes. “So, anyway, thanks for taking over. No one else could have.”
Just then, her father, all hearty and booming, brings in a plate of brownies. “Made them myself,” he says. “I’m becoming quite a good cook and not a bad baker. When Life kicks you in the teeth, take my advice. Make brownies.” He passes them to each of us, takes two himself, and leaves with a wink, closing the door behind him.
While we’re busy devouring the delicious brownies, I can’t help wondering if the closed door is to protect us from getting murdered by Mrs. Carrington. Hazel and her sister probably speak loudly as a kind of warning to be on the alert, and the decibels are now second nature to them.
My madwoman play is still in my head. Nothing yet has been committed to paper, but these things take time. I’m hoping I can write, because I’ve proven I sure can’t act. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s even worth my while to be in the drama club.
“I can’t wait to get back to school,” Hazel says, “even if it’s only to write exams.”
“I know the feeling. Home can get on your nerves.” I glance around and think
especially this place
.
“Where have you been?” my mother asks as soon as I get home. “I’ve made hair appointments for both of us. We have less than ten minutes to get there.”
“What?”
“Smartly, now! Yours is first. Just a trim.”
“But—”
“No buts.”
We have to walk quickly, even though it’s broiling hot. Sweat runs down my back in torrents.
Just before the hairdresser’s, we notice a sign on a telephone pole:
ARE YOU SUFFERING?
Yes
, I think as I rub an arm across my damp forehead. On the next pole:
THERE IS HOPE
.
Yay!
On the next pole:
COME AND BE HEALED BY FAITH!
Mother says, “It must be summer. The snake oil salesmen are back.”
“What do you mean?”
“The faith healers. They apparently shake the very devil out of you, and you’re supposedly cured of anything from leprosy to ingrown toenails. And if the cure isn’t immediate, they sell you some sort of holy oil to hurry it along.”
“You mean the revival meetings they have in that tent in the park? Maybe they could cure my eczema.”
“Don’t you dare go near them! They’re charlatans, most of them. I would be mortified if my daughter was seen going to a faith healer.”
At the Crowning Glory Beauty Salon, the door is open to allow what little breeze there is to penetrate the stifling shop, with its mixed bouquet of sulfurous permanent-wave solution and perfumed shampoos and setting lotions. I skulk near the door, waiting to be called, while Mother sits down beside a vaguely familiar woman, a Mrs. Harmon. Mother says a polite hello. Mrs. Harmon doesn’t return the greeting. Instead, she gets up and moves across the room to look out the window. A bit deaf, I guess. There are two other women waiting and three more having things done to their hair who avoid looking at my mother.
Creeps
, I think.
Has Mother got bad breath or something?
I nab a magazine and become engrossed in an article about teenage girls and whether or not they should kiss on a first date. Not a problem for me—I’ve never had a date.
Another woman, Mrs. Glidden, pays for her hairdo and, before leaving the shop, stops in front of Mother.
“Hello, there, Dora. Have you been away?”
Mother looks up. “Why, yes,” she says. “I’ve been in Toronto. My son’s in hospital there.”
Mrs. Glidden looks shocked in a phony kind of way, as if she knows a secret. She glances at the other ladies: one being shampooed, one being snapped into metal curlers, and one under a dryer. My mother looks puzzled when everyone stares.
Mrs. Glidden bends close. “He must have an awful bad dose of it, then,” she whispers as loudly as she can. Simultaneously, the dryer reaches the end of its cycle and is turned off; the rinsing of hair under the tap finishes; all chatter ceases. The Crowning Glory is all ears.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Mother says, frowning. She glances at me and shrugs. Just then, I’m called to a sink to have my hair washed.
When I emerge from under the tap, I hear someone say to Mother, “It’s awful what these boys bring home with them from overseas. Even the nice ones.” I’m led to a chair to have my hair combed out and the ends trimmed.
Mother’s voice is even. “Jamie’s disease has nothing to do with the war. He has something called leukemia.”
I think I hear someone mutter, “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
“I’m ready for you, Mrs. McLaren,” Bonnie, the stylist, says.
In the mirror, I watch Mother sit with her back to the sink while Bonnie swirls a cape about her, fastening it tightly at the neck. She looks a little sick, as if there’s something nasty about the topic Mrs. Glidden has raised.
With her face turning red, she pulls at the neck of the cape until Bonnie says, “Is it too tight? Here, let me fix it.” Something unfair is going on. Mother looks wounded, as if she has just figured out what it is.
The girl finally gets her comb through my thick hair and begins to cut it.
After Mother’s shampoo, Bonnie ushers her to the styling chair beside mine and begins to trim away little feathers of her wet hair. “They say it’s going to cool right down tonight,” Bonnie says.
“It can’t happen too soon for me,” Mother says. “Toronto was like an oven.” She continues to talk a little louder than she normally would.
Mrs. Glidden, on her way out, stops to chat quietly with Mrs. Harmon.
“Bonnie,” Mother says, “I hope you will never know what it’s like to have a desperately sick child.”
“I heard something about your boy. What’s he got?”
“I’m afraid it’s leukemia.”
“What’s
that
?” Her nose wrinkles. “Is it serious?”
Beside me in the mirror, I can see Mother swallow hard. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.” Taps are off, again; dryers off for readjustment. “It’s a type of cancer—cancer of the bone marrow, the specialist told us.”
A quiet hum of sympathy goes through the place. “Oh, dear! I’m so sorry to hear that,” Bonnie says. “Is there anything they can do for it?”
“Blood transfusions, mainly, I guess. We have our hopes pinned to that. He wants to start university in the fall, but we’ll just have to wait and see.”
A few heads are shaking at the magnitude of what they’ve just heard.
Imagine! What would you do if it was one of yours?
They aren’t vicious, I guess, not really. Mrs. Glidden goes over and pats Mother on the shoulder before she leaves the shop.
I’m finished first and go home. I don’t know what all the innuendos were about, but, I wonder if they had anything to do with something Mary said to me the day I told her that Jamie fainted.
“What
,” Mother asks, “is the basis of this horror story going around?”
Dad and Granny and I are all in the kitchen before dinner. Mother is mashing the very devil out of the potatoes.
“Shall I do that, dear?” Granny asks. “I fear for the bottom of the pot.”
“No, thank you.”
Dad’s reading the paper at the table. “What horror story?”
I gather up salt and pepper and a plate of butter to set the table in the dining room but stop to listen.
Granny pauses in her self-appointed task of removing the cutlery from its drawer and wiping out the various
sections, muttering, “Hasn’t been done in months—dust, crumbs, who knows what all.”
“What story?” I say.
“That Jamie picked up some hideous disease when he was overseas.”
I think for a minute. “The clap?” I ask, without a clue.
Dad looks up abruptly from the paper, his face almost purple. Mother looks as if she’s just filled her mouth with piping hot potatoes. Granny lets a handful of forks clatter to the floor.
It eventually becomes clear, with my help, in a roundabout way, that it has to do with something Mary Foley said on the phone to Jamie before he went to Toronto, something I asked my friends about, something my friends must have asked their mothers about—friends who are on much more intimate terms with their mothers than I am with mine. I didn’t know it was something disgusting. How would I? No one ever tells me anything. I still don’t know exactly what it is, but I’m thinking it has something to do with head lice. I’ve been scratching my own head ever since.
All I know is, it has nothing to do with Jamie or his condition. We talk to him long-distance every second day. He’s getting better, he says, just as I knew he would.
14
Jamie is home looking ghostly, but, little by little, color is coming into his cheeks. He seems to spend a lot of time in his room. Once when I peeked in, he was writing at his desk, with that pile of papers near him, tied at one corner with string. I wish I had X-ray vision; I’d love to know what he’s doing. But I left him in peace. Sometimes you have to.
Letters not sent
.
I guess it’s a bit of a cheat, writing this now that the war is over, but it’s sort of about the war. Anyway, it seems right to include it, so here goes
.
I had some time before I had to catch the train home, after I was discharged from hospital. I
found the street where Leeson’s widow lived, with the help of a street map, and spotted the house, a small bungalow hunched in between two other almost identical bungalows. But, then I got cold feet. I really ought to have phoned first, in case she needed a chance to comb her hair or something
.
I walked to the end of the block and studied the picture of Dulcie Leeson. She wasn’t really all that funny-looking. There was something rather charming about her teeth. The way they protruded slightly, made her look naive, in need of a strong man to protect her. No wonder Leeson had married her before going off to war. In some ways, I wished she was my girlfriend. On the back, she’d written “Love and kisses, Dulcie.”
I felt a few drops of rain and drew in a big breath. It was now or never. I needed to just walk back and knock on the door before I lost my nerve
.
It was definitely Dulcie who answered the door, with a smile on her face that quickly changed to curiosity. She looked terrific. It was obvious that she didn’t need any time to run a comb through her hair. It was shining and lovely and pulled back with barrettes
.
A little kid in overalls ran up behind her yelling, “Daddy, Daddy.” Embarrassed by his mistake, he pulled back, hiding behind his mother’s skirt
.
This brought me pretty close to tears. The poor little guy was still waiting for his dad to come home from the war. Hadn’t his mother explained? I’m not very smart about little kids. I figured it was a boy, but with all that curly hair, it could have been a girl. No idea how old—three, maybe
.
I introduced myself. “A friend of your husband’s during the war
,”
I said. Her jaw dropped a little in surprise. “I’m returning your picture. He had it … with him when …”
She went kind of pale, which made me wonder if I’d done the right thing in taking the picture from Leeson’s pocket. Maybe, given a chance, he would have said, “Bury it with me.” How can you know people’s minds when it comes to death? What if giving her back the picture was the most heartless thing in the world?
Perhaps this was why I’d waited so long. Or maybe it wasn’t. I think the truth is, I didn’t want to get embroiled in somebody’s sadness and have to stand there and try to think of the right thing to say. I’m no good at that
.
“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “Come in, come on in.” She hung my damp coat on a hook near the door and led me into a cozy living room
.
The little kid, probably a boy, stared at me, then buried his head on his mother’s knee.
She picked him up. Sitting across from her in Leeson’s living room, the child peacefully sucking his thumb, I was clearly aware of what Leeson was missing. And then I saw him frantically digging a hole in the ground for protection, saw him mashed and bloody, lying in the hole that became his grave. And I thought, What’s the point? What’s the point of anything? And that’s when I became aware once again of the trembling earthquake that I was afraid was splitting me off from the rest of the world. Crazy, eh, Rachel?
I handed her the picture. She studied it, smiled sadly, and put it on a small table out of the child’s reach. “Thank you
,”
she said. “You’re very kind.”
“Sorry it took so long for me to get it to you.”
“That’s all right. These things can be, well, pretty awkward.”
I said, “Leeson, I mean your husband, never said anything about a baby.” Cripes, I couldn’t even remember Leeson’s first name
.
She said, “The letter never reached him. The army returned it to me, along with several others that hadn’t caught up to him.” She brushed the kid’s hair back from his face and said, “Freddie looks just like his dad did.” And I could see it. Fred Leeson. Of course
.
The front door opened, and a tall heavyset man came in. He leaned into the living room, puzzled, and said, “Hi, there. I’m Jeff Emerson.”
Dulcie said, “This is James. He was a friend of Fred’s in France. Here, Jeff, take Freddie.” She wanted to go to the kitchen to get us some coffee
.
The little boy squirmed willingly down from her lap and ran to Jeff saying, “Daddy.” Jeff picked him up, kissed him, and sat him on his knee
.
“Dulcie and I are married
,”
he said. “Did she tell you?”
I wondered if I looked as shocked as I felt
.
“No
,”
I said
.
“Six months ago.”
“Oh.”
Jeff looked at me as if he expected me to say something else. So I said, “That’s nice.” I felt like saying, “Could she not wait a bit?” Jeez, Leeson was hardly dead a year. Well, close to two years, I guess. Still, he’d been so proud of her and loved her so much, no question about that. This would not have made him happy, having this big lug take his place and the baby calling him Daddy. Cripes, where was her heart? I wanted to get up and leave
.
Dulcie came back in with cups of coffee on a tray
.
Jeff said, “I told him about us getting married.”
Dulcie smiled at me. “It’s what Fred would have wanted
,”
she said
.
How would she know? It would have broken his heart, that’s what. Maybe I should have said congratulations. Bit late. I drank my coffee. Dulcie passed me a plate of cookies. Store-bought
.
I swallowed my coffee too quickly and burnt the roof of my mouth. Trying hard to put on a bright face, I said, “I should be going.” Dulcie walked me to the door
.
While I was putting on my coat, she said quietly, “I mourned him. I cried myself to sleep most nights, knowing that he would never see his beautiful boy.” And then she said, “One day I woke up and realized that the sun was shining right in my eyes. I think it dazzled me into saying to myself, ‘My life continues.’ ”
She was looking at me. I knew I looked anything but happy, anything but understanding
.
I said, “It’s hard to comprehend that other people’s lives go on.” I opened the door and stepped out. The rain was only a light drizzle
.
“Thank you for coming and for bringing the picture
,”
Dulcie said. Suddenly, she called after me, “I’m sorry you’re still grieving.”
I nodded, waved, not trusting my voice. What an ass I was! What a phony! It wasn’t exactly Leeson I was grieving for. I almost felt like running back and telling her about myself. Instead, I continued plodding along, trying to avoid the puddles, until the street ended in a turmoil of drivers and streetcar-riders and pedestrians, each of them owning their own small portion of the world while mine was slowly crumbling
.