Little Red Lies (9 page)

“Jeez, Granny! That’s too hard.”

“You asked. I told you. And that’s just the basics. Now go and get a head start. I have work to do. I want to nail down some shingles on the shed roof before it starts to rain.”

At home, I follow Jamie into his room and he doesn’t even kick me out. His window overlooks the back garden,
where the apple tree is coming into bloom. The clouds are still heavy with rain. He opens the window, and we both breathe in the sweet, familiar smell of spring, of new grass yearning for a drink.

“I think I must be homesick,” Jamie says.

“How can you be homesick when you’re at home?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you just need a job. Dad will put you to work in the drugstore.”

“No, thanks. I would hate being forced to smile and be polite to all the old ladies who come in for their pills, or have to take wisecracks from the high-school crowd who come in for Cokes and laugh with them and pretend I have a good sense of humor.”

“But, you do have a good sense of humor.”

“Sure, for about one hour every three days.”

“What about university?”

“The thought of studying makes my bones ache.” He fills his nostrils with one last breathful of grass and new leaves and pending rain and shuts the window. “Maybe I’m just homesick for my youth.”

“Rachel!” we hear. “Stop bothering your brother and come down and help me fold the sheets as I take them off the clothesline. It’s starting to rain.”

I manage a theatrical sigh. “I am nothing but a slave in this house. A slave to her every whim.”

The rain doesn’t last long. I’m on my way back upstairs
when I meet Jamie on his way out. “Where are you going?” I ask.

“Out,” he says and leaves without further discussion.

Half an hour later, he’s back. I peek into his room, and there he is lying with his arm over his eyes as if he has a headache.

“Where did you go?” I ask.

“Nowhere.”

“I’m just being friendly. Tell me.”

“You’re just being nosy.”

I keep it up and keep it up, so just to shut me up, I think, his voice flat with disappointment, he tells me the bare bones of the rest of his afternoon.

Here’s what I think happened. I’m adding descriptive detail and dialogue because that’s the way my imagination works.

He walked down to Woolworths, pushed through the swing door, marched straight to Mary’s counter, and stood there until she finished selling a jar of cold cream to a customer. When the woman left, he spread both hands on the counter and told her he had a question.

“Hang on,” she said. “Madam!” she called to the departing customer. “You’ve left your parcel.”

The woman had to reach in front of Jamie to get her cold cream, and it took him a second to understand he was in the way. When he moved aside, another customer stepped in front of him. And then Mary had to go to the
stockroom, and after that there was a department meeting.

“Sorry,” she said, “I can’t get out of it.”

And then he came home.

“What did you want to ask her?” I kind of knew already.

“Nothing of any importance to you.”

School resumes. Daffodils begin to appear in flower beds. The buds on the trees burst into leafy lace. And the sun, toasty by midday, tells us to put away our winter woollies.

Ruthie’s back at school. Her voice is still a little raspy, but she’s not coughing as much.

After the final bell, we go to play practice, an extra one to make up for lost time. As prompter, I take up my position in the wings. Mr. Tompkins stops the action once or twice to offer suggestions, but on the whole the first act of the play rolls along smoothly. Remarkably, Hazel keeps all her lines straight, until Ruthie’s line comes up:
Will that be all, Madam?
But Ruthie doesn’t stop there. While Hazel’s character waits to shout her next line, Ruthie’s character grasps her hand dramatically and says,
I do hope so, Madam, as I must go to look after my poor
fiancé, who was badly injured in a terrible war, and I’m so afraid he might die
. She emits a loud sob and places the back of her other hand on her brow.

The actors stand openmouthed, and Hazel pulls back as if from a burning coal. Mr. Tompkins climbs the steps to the stage, sputtering and shaking his script.

I shield my eyes with my forearm from the pain of seeing the entire rehearsal shattered, knowing that the fault is largely mine.

To give her credit, Ruthie explains her decision to change the lines without mentioning my coaching. Deep in the wings, I find a chair and sit hunched over my knees, feeling like Doctor Frankenstein.

After the actors return to their places and resume their roles, and after Hazel gets back into the swing of belting out her lines with the help of my prompts, and after it’s over and everyone leaves for home, Ruthie and I walk along the street to her corner.

“I didn’t think it would matter all that much,” she says in her own defense. “There’s always so much going on, I didn’t think anyone would even notice. It’s mostly your fault, though.”

“I didn’t tell you to add more lines. You don’t go in and make changes that the writer wouldn’t approve.”

“Mr. Mackiewitz changed a couple of words that Hazel had trouble pronouncing,” Ruthie says.

“That’s different.”

Ruthie snorts. “So it’s all right if I act as if I’m sad, even though nothing in the script tells me to, but it’s not all right to say I
am
sad and why.”

After a moment, I say, “No, it isn’t. I was wrong to suggest a change at all.”

Ruthie grins at me. She loves it when I’m wrong. She says, “It’s too bad, really, because I kind of enjoyed beefing up my role. It felt right. I felt like a true actress.”

We part then, Ruthie hurrying along to her house. I poke along to mine, but, as I amble in, I hear Jamie almost shouting, “I’m
not
getting lazy!”

“Well, you need a tonic, then.”

“All right, all right! Stop badgering me. I’ll go to the doctor!”

I half-expect Mother to tell him to go to his room, but it’s Mother who leaves.

“Maybe I should take your advice and start writing a book about the war,” he says to me.

I hang my spring jacket on a kitchen chair, knowing Mother will come back and tell me to move it. “Of course you should.”

“Mother thinks I’m a lazy bum.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Oh, but she does. She said as much. Now, if I were to say I was writing down my war experiences, I could stay in my room with the door shut and no one would see me doing nothing. That’s what upsets her. She can’t
stand to see a member of this family being idle. You can read a book, but not for too long and not in the morning because that’s when chores
have
to be done. Useless to imagine you can put them off until the afternoon. You can listen to records or the radio, but not for more than an hour and not every day. And you definitely cannot lie around sleeping in the daytime, especially when the sun’s out, without someone telling you to go to the doctor.”

“I think you need to have a plan. She would stop pestering you if you had a plan of action.”

“I have a plan. I’m going to start winding my watch on a regular basis and just go on from there.”

“Ruthie said you told her sister you were going to become a commercial artist. I didn’t know you were good at drawing.”

“Good at drawing!
Ha!
I can barely draw a breath.” He laughs so hard at his own joke he chokes, and Mother returns to pound him on the back and hand him a glass of water. “I’m just a little out of shape,” he gasps.

“We’ll go to the doctor first thing in the morning,” Mother says.

“Not we, I.”

“I think you need me to go with you.”

“Mother, I’m a grown man. Why would I …? Can you not just leave it up to me?” He leans on the table with his head in his hands.

“I go with your father,” she points out. “It’s better if there are two heads to take everything in; that way I can remind your father to take his pills, or do whatever it is he’s supposed to do.”

“God!”

“Don’t swear.”

“Does he go with you when you have a medical problem?”

“Well, no, of course not. He doesn’t want to be involved with women’s things. Why would he?”

“Good God,” I hear him mutter as he goes upstairs.

I head up shortly afterwards and, through his half-open door, I can see him at his desk reading from a sheaf of papers tied together with string.

Outside his door, I call, “Have fun at the doctor’s tomorrow.” Before going into my room to do my homework, I add, “You’ll be able to check out the new Dingbat calendars. They’re even funnier than the old ones.”

“You’re the Dingbat,” he says.

“No, you are.”

“So, what’s the verdict?” I ask him the next day, when I get home from school.

“Doctor Melvin says my blood’s low, whatever that means. That’s why I have no energy and no appetite. I have to take pills and a tonic.” He’s stretched out on his bed.

“Your blood is low?”

“I think I’m registering only about half a tank.”

I’m picturing the Dingbats getting blood transfusions from something that looks like gas pumps.

“The doctor explained it, but I wasn’t listening,” he says.

As spring warms into a promise of summer, Jamie religiously takes his tonic and pills and seems a lot better, as far as I can tell. Not only that, he’s been accepted into Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, admitted under the Veterans Charter, so no tuition costs. Now, unfortunately, he has time for his love life.

He invites Mary over to listen to records in the living room, one evening near the end of May. Our family tactfully goes to bed early, although I have to make several trips downstairs—once to find the book I’m reading, once to make myself a brown sugar sandwich, and then to find my fountain pen. I’m sure I left it in the dining room. It isn’t my fault that they don’t notice me searching under the table for it.

I can’t help overhearing Jamie say sweetly, “Mary, why don’t you move to Toronto when I do? You could probably get a better job than the one you have here.”

“I’m not sure I want to live in a big city. And my mother wouldn’t let me.”

“But this is your life, not your mother’s.”

“Try telling her that.”

“Listen, you’re old enough to stand up for yourself. I feel as if your mother is beside us every time I try to hold your hand or kiss you.”

“Well, I can’t help that.”

“Tomorrow is Saturday. Let’s just go somewhere. I’ll borrow Dad’s car; he won’t mind. We’ll drive up to, I don’t know, somewhere beyond Claymore. We’ll lose ourselves in the woods. There’s a lake about half a mile from the road. We can go swimming.”

“I threw out my last year’s bathing suit.”

“We’ll swim in our underwear.”

“Our underwear!”

Beneath the table, I clap my hand over my mouth to stifle a gasp. If this idea doesn’t make Jamie’s heart pump more blood into his system, I didn’t know what will. Mine is certainly going a mile a minute.

“Yes.”

“It’s still only May. The water will be too cold.”

“We’ll just wade.”

“I have to baby-sit.”

“Sunday, then.”

“After church.”

“Of course.”

If his voice is anything to go by, I think his blood level’s dropped to an all-time low.

Mary says, “I don’t know if I could do that after church. I mean, I’d be thinking about it all the while I was in church, and I wouldn’t be accepting the Blessed Mother into my heart with a pure spirit. I mean, we’ll be next to naked. And then what? That’s what I’m worried about.”

Jamie lets out a long trying-to-be-patient-but-failing sigh. “We’ll keep our clothes on.”

“But, what will we do? It sounds kind of boring.”

“I’ll bring a deck of cards.” His voice is hollow with disappointment.

“I’m not allowed to play cards on Sunday. The Blessed Mother—”

“Blessed Mother! Blessed Mother! There are just too many mothers in our lives.”

It rains on Sunday, buckets, and it keeps on all day, with occasional thunder and lightning. Not to mention wind. People coming out of church have their umbrellas blown inside out. Anyway, as it ends up, Mary has to baby-sit, again.

My pen, I discover, is on the desk in my room, so that’s a relief.