Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (31 page)

Eileen woke up in full daylight to see June standing beside the bed holding a tray. On the tray was a mug of coffee, cream and sugar, slices of homemade whole-wheat toast.

“Oh, Lord. That's what I was going to do for you.”

“What was?”

“Bring you coffee in bed. I was awake earlier. I was just waiting. I was waiting till it got a little more light.”

Eileen did not say that she had been awake all night, or almost all night, aware of the firmness of the mattress, the smoothness of the sheets, and herself as a foreign and uncalled-for object on top of them.

“How can you live without a watch?” said June, and set the tray down. “It's just as well you didn't get up and try anything. You couldn't have worked the grinder.”

Indeed Eileen had forgotten. They ground their own coffee. They got two or three kinds of beans from an import store downtown, and produced their own blend.

“Anyway I had to get up,” June said. “There's an incredible lot of things to do.”

“I can help.”

“Help me now by drinking your coffee and staying put while I get some of the thundering herd out of the way.”

She meant the children, that was what she always called them. The same now. The same bright offhand tone. She was already dressed, in orange pants and an embroidered Mexican blouse of unbleached cotton. She looked entirely as usual, her sandy hair pulled back and held with an
elastic band, long wispy bangs loose on her forehead. The same look of quivering eagerness, bossiness, busyness, both touching and infuriating. Missionary wife. Ruddy skin, a rough texture to her cheeks and neck. Bereavement had heightened her color, if anything.

Eileen saw that she had been naive to have expected a change. She had thought June's body might have loosened, in her grief, that her voice might have grown uncertain, or been silenced. But last night when they embraced, at the airport, she felt her sister's body humming as always with its separate power; she heard June's voice break through her own beginning consolations with edgy insistence, almost triumphing.

“It's so windy, did you have a horrible flight?”

June sent the younger children off to school. June and Ewart had seven children—that is, seven counting Douglas. The first five were boys. Then they had adopted two girls, of Indian or part-Indian blood. The youngest was still in kindergarten. Douglas had been seventeen.

Eileen could hear June talking on the phone.

“I don't want their feelings repressed but I don't want them artificially stimulated, either. Do you see what I mean? Yes. That's their normal environment. I think they're better off. But I want them to have an opportunity to express their grief. If they want to express their grief. Yes. Exactly. Yes. Thank you. Thanks so much.”

Then she phoned to arrange for a coffee-maker.

“I knew at the time I should have bought a fifty-cup model and not the thirty. I always end up doing this. Oh, no. No, it's all arranged. No, I'd
rather
. Thanks tons.”

Following this she phoned several people and asked if they had rides to the funeral, or memorial service, as it was being called. She phoned up other people and asked if
they would mind providing rides for the people who were having difficulties; then she phoned the first people back and told them when and where they could be picked up. Eileen was up by this time, dressing, going back and forth to the bathroom. From the recreation room, downstairs, she heard rock music, turned unusually, perhaps deferentially, low. The older children must be down there. She wondered where Ewart was. She had the impression that not all these arrangements June was making were really necessary, or that, at least, it was not necessary for June to make them. Surely people could have figured out their rides for themselves. She found that she disliked even the tone of June's voice on the telephone.
Good morning, hi! Hi, it's June!
Such a cheerful buoyant matter-of-fact voice, and wasn't there in this very buoyancy some challenge, some lively insistence on control? Could it be said that June wished for admiration? Well, why not? If it will help. If anything will help.

Nevertheless Eileen disliked this tone, she was discouraged by it.

In the kitchen she washed her mug and plate. They were the only dishes in sight. The kitchen, at a quarter past nine in the morning, was shining like the kitchen in an ad. The dishes were all in the dishwasher, that was where they were. Eileen had forgotten about the dishwasher. She herself lived in an old house, a rented house in another city; she lived alone because she was divorced and her only child, her daughter, was wandering around Europe. She did not know how to operate a dishwasher.

She had left the crusts of her toast but now she ate them, because it was too difficult to figure out which garbage they should go into. It would take her a day here, at least, to get things straight. She had learned last night there was a new and complicated system of garbage division, to do with recycling. “I will have to get around to doing that too,” Eileen had said, and June said, “But
don't you?
”

Compared to June, she did live irresponsibly. Eileen
had to see this, she had to admit it. Her lazy garbage all thrown together, her cupboards under their surface tidiness bursting with chaos. Once she and June had had a confrontation about brown paper bags. Eileen, saving paper bags, stuffed them into a drawer. June folded them and smoothed them flat and was able to file them tightly against each other so that the drawer's capacity was greatly increased and the bags were easier to remove. Both sisters laughed angrily.

“I mean it's
easier
,” said June. “It's always easier. Actually in the end you save yourself time.”

“You're compulsive,” said Eileen, who would try when desperate to turn June's own language against her, using it flippantly and highhandedly. “Order is an anal perversion. I'm surprised at you.”

But she did try. In June's kitchen she tried all the time to remember the order, the always logical, though unexpected, classifications. She always made a mistake. When Ewart discovered one of her mistakes, something out of place, he would tap her on the arm with a look of apology and complicity, no words, shift whatever it was with a furtive flourish to wherever it ought to be. It was from this pantomime of his, this kindness and anxiety on her behalf, that Eileen understood how far all this was from being a joke, how deep and true June's outrage must be. In June's and Ewart's house she felt all the time the weight of the world of objects, their serious demands, the distinctions she had disregarded. There was a morality here of buying and use, a morality of consumerism. Eileen had never had any money, so she was able to be spendthrift, slipshod, content. June and Ewart, having such a great deal of money, bought and used each thing with a sense of responsibility which was not just a responsibility to themselves to own the best, the most efficient, durable, honest, things that were to be had, but a responsibility, as they would have said, to society. People who did not read
Consumer Reports
probably seemed the same to them as people who did not bother to vote.

The things they had the most difficulty buying were the things which serve no purpose but which are necessary to any house—pictures, ornaments. They had solved this finally by choosing Eskimo prints and carvings, Indian wall hangings, ash trays, and bowls, and some gray porous-looking pots made by a former convict now being sponsored as a potter by the Unitarian Church. All these things had an edge of moral value, and were decoratively acceptable besides. A pair of Kwakiutl masks—heavy stylized threat, dead ferocity—hung on the fireplace wall, receiving a good deal of admiration. What are such things doing in a living room, Eileen wanted to ask. She discovered in herself these days an unattractive finickiness about some things, about clothes, for instance, and decoration. A wish to avoid fraud, not to appropriate serious things for trivial uses, not to mock things by making them into fashions. A doomed wish. She herself offended. And Ewart and June did not mean to mock, they truly admired Indian art, they said, “Isn't that fierce? Isn't it fantastic?” In Eileen's own living room were some dim watercolors of flowers, an accidental collection of secondhand furniture, and who was to say that this shabbiness, this avoidance of style, was not in its way quite as bad an affectation as a display of Kwakiutl masks, pocked fertility goddesses?

Ewart came in from the garage, wearing work pants and shirt. His hair had grown down to his earlobes. “Would you like to see my Japanese garden?” he said to Eileen. “I was just out giving the shrubs a bit of attention. You can't take your eyes off them when they're getting started.”

His voice was cheerful, but she caught in his vicinity a smell of bad, sad, sleepless breath, masked not vanquished by mouthwash.

“Of course I'd like.”

She followed him through the garage, and outside. It was a mild cloudy February day. “It might be sunny yet,” Ewart said. He bent back the wet branches for her, he warned
her where the slope of the great lawn was slippery, he was as usual a kind and worried host. Wealth had made him courteous beyond all normal requirements, reticent, conciliatory, mysterious. When June first met him, at university—both she and Eileen had gone to their local university on scholarships—he seemed to have no friends. June went after him with the same badgering, comforting zeal she later showed towards African students, drug addicts, people in jail, Indian children. She took him to parties, where he early found his role as drink-server, host- and hostess-helper, neighbor- and occasionally police-mollifier, holder of heads of people being sick in the bathroom, confidant of girls whose boy friends were being mean to them. June said she was showing him life. She considered him deprived, handicapped, his name and his money marking him just as sadly, in her view, as a mulberry splotch on the face, a club foot. Nobody thought she meant to marry him. Nor did she think so. It took a while for her to see the possibilities, Eileen believed. She did bring him home, but that was all in her program of showing him life.

Eileen and June and their mother still lived then in the upstairs of a house behind a barbershop, on Becker Street. The rooms were dark, but had compensations. A fresh, soapy, masculine smell, from the barbershop. At night a rosy flash entering the front room from the café on the corner. Their mother had cataracts on both eyes. She lay on the chesterfield—she was stately, even lying down—and issued demands. She wanted glasses of water, pills, cups of tea; she wanted blankets removed and tucked in, her hair combed and braided. She also wanted radio stations phoned up and reproved for the use of slangy, vulgar, ungrammatical language; she wanted complaints delivered to the barbershop and the grocery store; she wished old friends or acquaintances to be contacted and given reports on her deteriorating health, and asked why they had not been to see her. June brought Ewart and made him sit and listen. By
majoring in psychology June had tried to get round the problem of their mother, just as Eileen had tried to do by the study of English literature. June had been more successful. Eileen was gratified by the high incidence of crazy mothers in books, but failed to put this discovery to any use. June, on the other hand, was able to present their mother to her friends with no apologies but plenty of prior explanation and post-discussion. She made people feel
privileged
. Ewart had to listen to a long, melancholy, garbled and untrue story about how their family was related to Arthur Meighen, former Prime Minister of Canada. June told him he was getting a firsthand look at the delusions fostered in people of a certain temperament by a no-exit socioeconomic situation. (She was learning by leaps and bounds the language that would serve her well for the rest of her life.) Eileen could not help but be impressed by this unexpected reaping of advantages, this sudden objectivity.

“It's easier for me of course because I'm the second child,” June told her, and anyone else who might be listening. “I was released from guilt,” she said, “it was all piled onto Eileen.” Under the kind but hard scrutiny of those Psychology, Sociology majors, Eileen, gloomy enough by that time anyway as a graduate student, saw herself moving guilt-crippled, unaware; dragging her irrelevant, mistaken courses in Literature, her disagreeable lover (Howie, that was, the man she later married and divorced); blundering like a bat in daylight. Astonishing how in one year June was able to shed her teenage plumpness, her fumbling for words, her innocence, dependency, confusion and gratitude. Who would have thought she had a loud clear voice waiting, a flushed bony face and nervous hurrying body waiting to be revealed, as well as all that certainty? Only a couple of years before, she had written poetry, she had read the books Eileen was reading, she had seemed to have some vague idea of fashioning herself after her older sister. Not a chance.

Which was foresighted of her, of course. Eileen had
married Howie, the cranky journalist who had left her with a little girl to support. June had married Ewart and set about establishing their life. While Eileen's life took shape any way at all, blown apart by crises, deflected by pleasures, June's life was built, planned, lived deliberately,
filled
. There was a lack of drifting and moping. Occasions were made the most of.