More in Anger (17 page)

Week after week, Pearl shopped for groceries at the Co-op and straightened the house, supervised the cleaning woman and cooked, angrily and without enthusiasm. Jamming the spatula down on the fried ham. Peeling the potatoes so that the peels flew. Kitchen work was too obvious a part of her “domestic bondage,” she told May, which she was learning more about through her reading. Besides, she simply
did not like
to cook, and was there something so terribly wrong with that? No, there wasn't, May wrote back, though your family do have to eat, and who else is there but you to feed them? “Why do you never take my side?” Pearl countered. “People without children are the first to offer stupid commentary.”

She did not consider herself an impulsive person, but one day she acted like one: she stopped at a driveway where a card-board sign advertised puppies for sale. “I must be out of my mind,” she thought, but she brought two of them home in a box. As if she needed more work to do. But she missed having a dog around, there had always been a dog when she was growing up, and perhaps this would end some unhappiness. The pure black puppies were both males, and would be less trouble than females. She named them Wayne and Shuster, and told the girls they
would keep them as long as they were willing to help. It was only Vivien who really took to them; she spent hours on her stomach playing with them and chatting away as if they could understand her. But Vivien was an unreliable and inconsistent caregiver of herself as well as others. She forgot to wear her undershirt, she forgot to close the door behind her when she left the house. One day she had taken the puppies down to the creek without permission and one of them had fallen in off the log that crossed the water and Vivien had gone in after it and the two of them were soaked and half drowned by the time they got back to the house.

In the mornings, while Tom practised the piano, Pearl got the girls up, supervised their dressing and washing and brushing, and herded them into the kitchen, where they sat down at their places for breakfast. A multivitamin was placed on each of the three bread-and-butter plates beside a glass of juice or a pared grapefruit or a quartered orange. Pablum for the almost six-year-old Vivien, and one of four different kinds of porridge for the others spooned into bowls and a watchful eye kept on how much sugar each girl used, especially Amethyst, who would empty the bowl if you let her. Clean, neat and tidy, with lunch kits and satchels, and plenty of time to walk to the bus stop at the corner, they were thrust out the back door and Pearl closed it firmly behind Laurel and Amethyst. One more to go. Vivien. Who clearly longed to go with her sisters but instead remained at home, playing with her dolls, playing with the dogs, practising her reading. Drawing. Keeping quiet and out of her mother's way.

Laurel was unruly, loud and belligerent, and she still lied and cried in turn or at once at the least purported offence. Amethyst was still obedient but with that tendency to fidget, to bite her nails and to eat, and finally Vivien, thin and boyish, was either clinging to the house like a limpet or running off to play down at the creek.

It was Wayne, not Shuster, who started catching chickens at the neighbour's, and a solution had to be found or that neighbour threatened to use the shotgun. Pearl consulted her father. She then asked the neighbour for one of the dead birds and she tied it securely around the dog's neck with baling twine. The carcass, which stank worse with every passing day, stayed attached to the dog's neck until it rotted off. No one, not even Shuster, would go near him. Pearl felt a pulse of compassion as she looked at the sad, humiliated dog as he lay alone on a sack in the woodshed, but she repressed it. He had to learn, or he would lose his life. The children seemed unable to get the picture. “
Please
take the chicken off, Mum? Please, Mum,
please
?”

“No. Be quiet.”

Tom said nothing. And her strategy worked: the dog never went after another chicken.

Vivien's first day of school was a monumental day for Pearl. She had been waiting years for this day, the day she would finally have the house to herself from September to June. Hallelujah! She expected to be filled with unquenchable joy. Yet while she knelt to do up Vivien's cardigan, she felt instead a tidal wave of deep sadness sweep through her so strongly that she gasped. She stopped, and Vivien, wondering, looked at her. Pearl smoothed
the shoulders of the sweater, feeling the child's bones beneath it. She turned up the cuffs once more before she got to her feet and ushered the three of them out into the world, shutting the door behind them. “Goodbye,” she said.

Turning away from the window and leaning up against the door, Pearl thought to herself: Freedom! But she felt bereft, not liberated. Why? she asked herself. What was the matter now? Why did she feel loss, not gain? Her chest seized up and her breath was rapid and shallow. The house was silent. The dogs quiet. Leaning up against the closed door, Pearl knew she was the one who had to do something about her life, because no one else was going to help her. But how? How was she to do this? She slid down against the door and wept, her head resting on her knees. What, oh what, was she going to do? What did she even
want
to do, now that she could? All that longing, all that waiting, but she had no plan. This blank slate, this empty canvas, this closed open door, and all she felt was panic.

Pearl preferred her parents safely confined to the silver frames on her dressing table, but she couldn't
always
dissuade them from coming. She did not enjoy their visits, and as the day of their arrival approached, the pressure inside her grew. She felt like a pinball inside. She knew she became more unreasonable and unpredictable in her criticisms and demands, and that it didn't endear her to anyone. But nothing in the house was right. Why did her parents have to come at Christmastime? They had
just been here at Easter and again in August. Look at the house. Everything was a shambles. She was a terrible housekeeper and she knew it, and everyone else knew it too, but she was still expected to do a good job.

On the day her parents arrived, Pearl left the older two girls at home—Ruby had arrived home from California on the bus—and loaded Amy and Vivien into the car and drove into Vancouver, where Opal and Mac were waiting outside the train station with their luggage. No doubt they were irked at her tardiness, Pearl said as she parked the car. Well, that was just too bad. They could bally well wait.

Her mother stood sturdily and patiently, short-gloved hands holding her handbag in front of her. She wore a hat with black netting that fell elegantly over her face, and the bodies of dead mink were draped around the shoulders of her black wool coat. Those dead animals made Pearl's skin crawl. Beneath was her travelling dress, navy blue with tiny white dots, and on her feet were her shiny black lace-up grandma shoes with the tiny holes poked through in patterns.

Underneath the hat's netting Opal's face was worried, no doubt, though once she saw her granddaughters approaching at a run, a warm smile spread across her face and she opened her arms wide. Oh my dearies! she exclaimed. It's so good to
see
you! And they, so happy to be her
dear little girls
, instead of
her
miserable wretches, no doubt, rushed into her arms, and kissed her, breathing in the smell of her face powder and cologne. They had never greeted
her
so, thought Pearl. Their faces never lit up at the sight of
her
.

Pearl's father, ever the CPR lawyer, always dressed for the occasion (he even packed to dress for dinner at the fishing lodge). He wore a double-breasted suit and tie, and stood straight as a stick beside his wife. Under his hat his hair was straight, short and silvery white. His mouth was like Pearl's: straight as an arrow, and tight. He never hugged or kissed Pearl or the granddaughters, and he encouraged them to do the same.

“You're late, Pearl,” he greeted Pearl.

“Hello, Dad,” said Pearl. “Hello, Mother.”

After the drive out to Beresford, her mother's first concern was with the baking she had sent ahead. Had it all arrived? Was it in crumbs? They had better check. Amy and Vivien carried the boxes in from the back porch, where they were stored beside the selection of Dutch cheeses a patient had given Tom as payment. Pearl watched her mother snip the string and take off the brown paper wrapping. Carefully, she lifted out the pretty tins and opened the lids to reveal the fancy baking, baking she learned to do from
her
mother in Winnipeg, she told her granddaughters, and would teach them to do too, if they liked, and if they were good, which she was sure they were. (Ha, thought Pearl.) The younger two's watering mouths opened and shut with wild desire as they pushed up against their grandmother's warm, soft body and she tucked her peppermint “sweeties” into their mouths. Pearl turned her back, returned to the dishes.

Unlike her, her mother liked being in the kitchen, and she sat her granddaughters on stools and taught them to make ginger muffins, to put the half cup of oil into the measuring cup first and then the molasses so that the latter slipped out cleanly. She
taught them to cut in butter, and to roll pastry dough out lightly so it wouldn't be tough. They learned to sift and to measure, with spoons and a knife, and they made hearts and stars and gingerbread men with raisin eyes. All things she had once tried to teach Pearl, Pearl remembered, but Pearl had resisted mightily. May was a much better candidate for future domestic servitude, for becoming a domestic drudge. Opal sang under her breath as she made the soft white buns for their Christmas dinner, teaching the girls to knead and pluck the dough. Prepared them to look after men. There would be no progress for women as long as there were women like her mother around.

In the evening, her father and Tom attempted polite conversation as they shared a Scotch in the living room, but it faltered quickly. During the previous year's visit, her father had sided with Diefenbaker on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Tom with Kennedy, and there hadn't been much common ground there or anywhere else. Neither one of them had forgotten that and so they soon escaped to reading, Tom to
Clavier
, her father to a thick tome like Samuel Clarke's
The Life and Death of Hannibal, the Great Captain of the Carthaginians
. Pearl and her mother sat side by side on the loveseat, knitting. In between rows Pearl calculated the hours until she dropped her parents back at the station, the hours until her parents would leave her in peace.

Her parents died a year apart, her father in April 1964, her mother the following summer. May was devastated each time, but not Pearl. For the longest time the deaths seemed to be
something she had made up, or dreamt, and she wondered at herself for not feeling anything much, no waves of sorrow, no great loss. Not even for her father. Perhaps the grief would come later? Perhaps, as her mother had said, she indeed had no heart? But she knew that wasn't so. She knew the depths of her feelings in other matters, if no one else did.

Three weeks after Pearl returned from her mother's funeral in Calgary, a moving van backed up the driveway and burly men unloaded the mahogany dining room suite, china barrels, wooden crates and boxes and carried them into the house. In the boxes were yellow and green, pink and blue satin-covered eiderdown quilts, Hudson's Bay blankets, linen tablecloths and serviettes. Inside the barrels and crates, packed in thin strips of newspaper and curls of wood shavings, were elegant glassware, china and silver serving dishes. Amy and Vivien were enlisted to unpack the set of pink roses Limoges china; the delicate German hot chocolate mugs; the silver teapot that had been a wedding gift to her parents from her father's family in Scotland.

With the money she inherited, Pearl took charge of the house. She added on a dining room to accommodate her parents' dining room suite, and a study for herself. Her new study, her
room of her own
, had a full wall of built-in bookshelves, one small window that looked into the forest and down the ravine, and a heavy padded door that she kept closed.