Small Change (22 page)

From my bedroom window the view was black and white, glittering and cold: a white sky intercut by the rise of the hill, the slope of the farmhouse, the shaggy line of spruce trees. The house had been comfortable once and was beautiful still.

The way to the hill wasn’t all that pretty. You walked off the end of the street into a rocky uneven field that opened up into a gravel pit. You skirted the pit, avoiding the silver needles of the hawthorn trees, and began the gradual climb
to an old road that curved into the driveway and up to the house. Tin cans lay on the long porch, one step up and you were walking its grey boards. From here the school was below on the right and my house, separated from the school by fields, was on the left. In the fall I walked through golden-rod to school. In the winter, snow drifted against the stalks, bending them down.

Passage of seasons, friendships, towns. The farmhouse is gone now, the hill is covered with houses.

In that bedroom I listened to the crickets – sad, panicked, restful – and after a year I went away to university. We saw each other from time to time and wrote, saw each other more infrequently and stopped writing.

For three days I have been rewriting this story using a version I wrote several years ago. Only now do I look again at the last letter because I want the exact words Leah used, and something happens that has happened to me before. I am astonished to find the source of pain so graceful. Only a few weeks ago I came upon a rejection letter I received from a publisher several years ago, and found it so well-meaning and warm-hearted that I sat down on the floor and read it twice. All I had remembered was the no.

Leah wrote: “I hardly know where to start writing. I can’t quite describe my emotions when I read that you had had a hard year, that you and Keith had separated. The truth is I probably would have put this letter off indefinitely, except
I have some kind of feeling that I want to contact you before you leave!”

The rest of the letter is much more interesting to me now than it was when I first read it. She makes the comment about her life being in God’s hands, then goes into detail about puppetry, her new enthusiasm. I understand that I might have been looking for something more than puppet shows about Bible stories, but at the moment this seems a lot.

I reread some of the earlier letters, finding them so spirited and plucky and kind, so crowded with worry, turmoil and doubt, so laced with affection that, again, I think of tracking her down. I know who might have her address and I could find his address and ask for hers. But would it be any different? Or is it different enough now?

Her address in the final letter, written twelve years ago, is the one in Nova Scotia. It’s hardly likely that she would still be there, though last summer I came close to finding out. We drove to the Maritimes and before we left I promised myself that we would go through her town, I would find a phone booth, I would look for her name in the phone book. But once we got to Nova Scotia, I could see that her town would take us too far out of our way, even though we could have driven there in less than an hour.

I
bought eye shadow for the first time when I was twenty-seven. I went into the Bay in Winnipeg and ran a gauntlet of glistening makeup counters. I stopped at the one that was least imposing and least expensive.

“Eye shadow,” the young woman behind the counter said, “should match your clothes. What colours do you wear?”

I was wearing brown.

I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Different colours. Blue,” I said.

She produced an array of blues and I chose a luminous chalky turquoise and slunk out of the store.

At work my friend Sheila and I went into the women’s washroom, amused and embarrassed, and she gave me a quick demonstration. For some weeks I applied the blue eye shadow and then I stopped. I stopped the eye shadow and I forgot how to apply it. In a few years I was a blank slate for the next friend.

Certain things I liked. The potent smells, the compact shapes, the bad poetry. Mauve platinum, spring mist, citrus coral. I saw them in other people’s bathrooms – these circles and tubes – and they made me feel excited and foolish. They represented a world forbidden to me by my background. And what was that background? A family that ridiculed any form of display. I was, heart and soul, a Puritan.

Makeup reminded me of myself. Lipstick drew my attention to my lips not just in the application but afterwards. They felt different, matte, moist. And the smell, though slight, didn’t disappear. I didn’t want to keep noticing my lips all day long.

It reminded me of myself and yet I was applying someone else’s face. It was a way of forgetting myself and of not being able to.

When I was thirty-one Lorna showed me how to do my whole face. We stood in her sewing room, two medium-sized women in front of a medium-sized mirror, and she did one side of my face and I did the other – an eye for an eye, a cheek for a cheek – in a foreshadowing of the end of our friendship. She gave me various things she didn’t need – extra lipstick, powder, foundation – and these I kept and eventually gave to my daughter.

One winter when I was thirty-five and tired, Sophie came to visit. Once again there was a mirror and a friend instructing me in the art of makeup. She was laughing. She was beautiful, playful, and overly lighthearted. Soon she would be walking with a cane and using makeup ordered especially from Europe. Towards the end her skin acquired an unholy radiance, a sulphureous quality, a yellow-green luminous cast. Two weeks
before she died, she bought a new pair of large silver earrings. Hours before she died, she was still insisting that a book she had lent be returned.

On this visit, however, she was laughing. She was amused by her choice of a husband. She called him “a man of commerce” and said her father finally approved. It would be her third marriage. There had been Rich, then Rickie, now Richard the man of commerce. His parents knew about the first marriage but not the second. Her friends were sworn to secrecy.

She stayed with us overnight and I couldn’t sleep. At three in the morning I was playing with my lips and smelling saffron on my fingertips. Cool air came through the window after days of heat, but it was no help; its presence disturbed me as much as Sophie’s. I shook Ted’s shoulder.

“I can’t sleep,” I said. “I can’t ever sleep when we have guests. I think angry thoughts. About my parents. About you.”

“So every time someone stays over, you can’t sleep because you’re angry.”

It’s true. Why was I so angry?

Some countries are equally touchy about being invaded. Mexico, for instance, has been invaded so often it doesn’t trust anybody. I jealously guard my borders having recaptured them from family and various schools. But what am I guarding? The contrast between the size of the fortifications and the paltriness inside eats away at me.

Ted told me that his first wife also hated guests. Is that so, I said.

“She was always pretending when they were around. She couldn’t be herself and it made her bad-tempered.”

My perceptive husband. His first wife also insisted that he heat her cup with hot water before pouring in coffee. Why, he asks from time to time, do I always fall for women who are fussy about their coffee?

Over breakfast Sophie talked about her wedding (she had slept well and on my pillow). She was sure there would be a wedding, but not sure when. The man of commerce had given her a single calla lily months ago, and promised they would get married when she received twelve. The number had stalled at eleven.

Then Ted told a story about a young woman in Mexico called Doris. One morning she met a man who in the afternoon sent her a dozen roses. The next day he sent her two dozen roses, the third day three dozen, and so on, until on the twelfth day twelve dozen roses arrived and she gave in: she agreed to marry him.

“In Mexico,” said Ted, “men pile it on until the woman gives in, here they hold back.”

The story so delighted me that I didn’t bother to point out the price of flowers in Mexico, or to ask the obvious question. In their lavish generosity and excessive gestures, are Mexican men more loving? If I opened my doors to every friend for indefinite stretches of time and welcomed them without reservation or loss of sleep, would I be a better friend? Is my husband a better friend because he enjoys nothing more than sharing a house with untold numbers of people? Or is there something about such friendliness that flattens people – dispenses a uniform
light – so that no one affects you and everyone is the same?

In this logic, which isn’t new to me, I’ve chewed it over a hundred times, I become the true friend: the ugly duckling who turns into a swan. Cinderella sitting in the ashes of friendship.

Lying awake that night while Sophie slept, I kept seeing her hands and remembering the language school in Mexico where we met. In class she would eat sweet buns with small bites over the course of an hour all the while saying, “si, si, si,” and laughing her musical feathery laugh. With her right hand she worked a soft ball of pink putty, and I asked her how much it hurt. She said it depended on the weather: When it was cold the fluids in her bones thickened, and it was much harder to move.

She was thirteen when her family left Tennessee for Chicago. That winter, on the way to school, her glasses froze to her face. At night she woke up with pain in her hands so intense that she had to soak them in hot water before she could fall back to sleep. In the morning her mother took her face in her hands and kissed it, then led her into the bathroom saying, “You need a little colour, my love.”

Sophie was beautiful at thirteen and even more so when she got older. Her bones were her gift and her affliction. High cheekbones, a fine nose, a beautifully sculpted chin – and then hands, and soon feet, that resembled claws.

After she died, her sister called me.”She wanted you to have her makeup. Shall I send it to you?”

“It’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“We used to put on makeup together. That’s why.” Then, “What would you do?”

“I’m wearing some now.”

The makeup arrived in September. It was a disturbed, intemperate, exaggerated month. All the rain that hadn’t fallen since June was falling now. My skin took to the moisture, and I was careless and liberal with the other moisture as we only are when something is free. First I read the names of the various petals, herbs and oils, then I applied the German lotions at night and in the morning, thrilled by the luxury.

In October the weather went dry and flushed, and I fell down the back porch steps. I lay on the ground for a few minutes, my hands pressed against my head, and when I took them away they were wet with blood. Two weeks later I fell down the steps from the second floor to the first, pulling my arm out of its socket. Now my neck had a leftward crick and my right arm was as weak as Sophie’s. I went into my son’s room. He was sleeping, and I marvelled at the purple cast of his eyelids, the ivory paleness of his cheeks, the fine redness of his lips – fascinated that an old lover’s cool ivory skin was the skin of my sleeping boy. I drew up his blanket with my left hand.