The Birthday Lunch (7 page)

“Yes.” The mention of Miss Pritchard makes Corrie uncomfortable and she shifts her bulk on the narrow chair. “If it’s all right with you, Claudia, I’ll be on my way. It’s been a long day.”

“Of course. I’ll call you a taxi.”

The women wait beneath the street light while bats swoop around them, veering away to avoid coming too close. Corrie observes that bats could teach the truck driver a thing or two but the remark is lost on Claudia, who cannot stop seeing her mother carrying two ice cream cones across the street. In the afternoon heat, the ice cream would have been melting. Did her mother hurry on that account?

Before shifting her weight into the taxi, Corrie says, “When your brother gets here, tell him to come see me. I was outside on the veranda when the accident happened. Mine is the brick house across from the Creamery. You could say I’m a witness, and your brother is a lawyer. Good thing you have a lawyer in the family. I had to hire one after Frank was killed.”

“You know Matt’s a lawyer?”

“Yes, and you’re a librarian.”

Claudia works in a university library but she is not a librarian and it embarrasses her that her father tells people she is.

“Your father often brags about the pair of you,” Corrie says.

Upstairs Claudia listens at the door of the purple spare room. Not a sound: her father is asleep and she is on her own. She does not want to be on her own, she wants to be with someone she can talk to, but there is no one to talk to. She cannot talk to her father and she cannot talk to Leonard who by now will be drawing in his study; no matter where he is, Leonard will be drawing. Claudia has never been inside his house, but she can picture where Leonard is because he has told her that most nights he draws in the study where he can keep an eye on the staircase. By this time of the night, Ruth will have shoved the day’s empty gin bottle beneath the back porch and if she hasn’t passed out in the living room, she might now be stumbling her way to bed. Twice Leonard has come home and found his wife at the bottom of the stairs. He did not carry Ruth upstairs to bed; instead he covered her with a blanket and placed a pillow beneath her head.

Claudia drifts into the kitchen and gazes at the untidy clutter on the countertop: the empty jars, pencils, elastics, a notepad scribbled with
pork chops, butter, rice
. Unwilling to erase her mother’s handwriting, Claudia casts around for something to do. When there is a death in the family, there are decisions to be made and duties to take on, but what are they? What did the Monahans do after Roger’s father and brother went out in a plywood boat to haul up lobster pots and never came back? Roger would have drowned, too, but
instead of going lobstering with Pete and Darren, he and Claudia pedalled to West Quaco that night and made out on the rough grass beside the lighthouse. Claudia remembers the deceptive calmness of the night, the shimmering path of moonlight on the water, the way the waves licked the rocks with scarcely a spit of foam. In the morning the plywood boat was spotted, upside-down, drifting shoreward past the caves. No sign of Pete or Darren. For three days everyone in St. Martins who could swim or row searched the redrock shelving beneath the water, their only reward a drifting oar. A father and son, summer cottagers from Maine, suited up in diving gear and went down for a look. Twenty feet down, they found Roger’s father wedged between the rocks. Claudia remembers how relieved the Monahans were to have his body to bury and wake. Darren’s body was never found and eventually it was assumed that the Fundy tides had carried him out to sea.

Beneath the shopping list, Claudia writes
Body
. Her mother’s body is at the undertaker’s but she cannot stay there, she will have to be buried. Claudia writes
Burial
and beneath it,
Funeral
with a question mark—an avowed atheist, her mother had no time for rituals, what she called “stuffy procedures.” Even so, there will have to be a gathering of some kind. Claudia writes
Wake
. After Mr. Monahan’s body was found, an announcement appeared in the
Kings County Record
. Claudia writes
Newspaper
and puts the list aside. Making the list has exhausted her and resigned to waiting—she remembers the hours she waited beside Roger in the Monahans’ kitchen—she makes her way to the bathroom and then to the yellow spare
room, the room her mother wallpapered with daisies before Hal insisted the wallpapering stop.

Paralyzed by grief, Hal has not changed position since coming to bed and he lies on his back staring into the dark, afraid that if he closes his eyes he will see Lily, broken and lifeless lying on the road. Did Lily see the truck coming? Was she terrified? Did she suffer? Hal tortures himself with these questions until he hears the reassuring sound of footsteps, the flush of the toilet, the groan of bedsprings as his daughter settles herself in the yellow spare room. With Claudia on the other side of the wall maybe he will fall asleep and forget he is alive, because that is what he longs to do—to forget he is alive.

S
ophie Power is an early bird and by nine o’clock has bread dough rising on the stove and a batch of oatmeal cookies cooling. The heat wave has finally broken and a comforting rain patters the window. Sophie’s kitchen is directly below the McNabs’, same side of the house but a different shape, theirs being long and narrow and Sophie’s wide and square like the farm kitchen she worked in most of her life. By this time in the morning she usually hears Hal’s footsteps overhead, but not today. What she hears is her own voice saying: let them sleep. Sophie remembers that after her husband, Rolf, died, what she wanted most was sleep.

Shrugging on the scratched orange slicker she used to wear feeding the chickens, Sophie lopes downtown in size ten sneakers and an ankle-long cotton skirt, a wicker basket at the end
of a monkey arm. As usual she is the first one in the Dominion except for Mr. Franzin who is opening the till. “Hello, Mrs. Power,” he says. “Good to see the rain.” Sophie nods then tramps around the store. She has been in here so often she knows where everything is and in five minutes is at the check out with two chickens, a package of yellow-eyed beans and a dozen eggs. Mr. Franzin leans across the counter and says, “Terrible, what happened yesterday, terrible. We heard screeching brakes and went out on the sidewalk. We could see Mrs. McNab lying on the road. Some reckless teenager behind the wheel of a truck.” Mr. Franzin shakes his head. “Scandalous, what goes on in this town.”

“It is scandalous,” Sophie says and not another word. She refuses to tell Mr. Franzin what she knows: that her granddaughter Jill and her friend Trudy had just left the Creamery and were heading toward the park when they heard truck brakes squealing to a stop. She won’t tell Mr. Franzin, or anyone else, that the girls turned and walked a little ways back and that as soon as Jill got a glimpse of the body lying on the road, she ran home and telephoned Sophie. “She’s dead, Grandma,” she sobbed. “She’s dead.”

“Slow down, Jill. Who’s dead?”

“Your neighbour. That nice woman who lives upstairs. She was hit by a truck. She was lying on the road. It was awful, Grandma.”

Sophie heard the fear in her granddaughter’s voice, the fear that if it had happened to the nice woman upstairs, it could happen to her. “You had better come over,” Sophie said.

“I can’t, Grandma. I’m calling Mom.”

“But Carol’s at work.”

“I know, Grandma, but I’m calling her.”

“If Carol can’t leave work, you come stay with me. You hear?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“All right then.” Sophie hung up the telephone. The conversation had exhausted her and she sat in the rocking chair waiting for her daughter’s call. Carol telephoned after she got home. She was upset. She had been at the front desk when Lily McNab came in after lunch for an X-ray and she was there when the call came in to send an ambulance to the Creamery. “I know how much you liked her, Mom,” Carol said. “Do you want me to come over?”

“No, No. You stay with Jill.”

Later, Sophie moved to the mangy living-room chair and stared at Lily’s garden: the delphinium, baby’s breath and roses growing outside the window. Sophie didn’t cook or clean or watch television but sat quietly while the awful news leaked in. She saw the taxi come into the driveway, Corrie Spears up front, Hal and Miss Pritchard in the back. No Lily. Her absence weighted Sophie to the chair; her body refused to get up and she stayed where she was. Which is why, sometime later, she saw Claudia being dropped off in the middle of the driveway by a white-bearded man Sophie had never seen before.

Sophie opens the kitchen door and setting the basket inside, shakes the slicker over the veranda rail before wiping her sneakers on the kitchen mat. The comforting warmth envelopes her. My, how she loves her kitchen, the rag rugs on the oak floor, the padded rocker, the scratched pine table and chairs, the pantry
shelves, the electric fridge and stove. She still misses the cast iron stove, but it was too heavy and costly to move from Millstream. She turns on the oven, flours her hands and lifts the warmed tea cloth from the bowl of risen dough. She punches down the dough before dumping it onto the floured board. Beneath her large, warm hands, she feels the dough breathing as she kneads and folds, kneads and folds, shaping the loaves until they are ready for the greased bread pans.

While she washes and dresses the chickens, Sophie casts her mind back to Grapevine, the game she and a circle of ten-year-olds used to play in the United Church basement. Cupping a hand to her mouth—there was an important lesson here—the minister’s wife whispered a sentence into the first girl’s ear and she whispered it into the next girl’s ear and so on around the circle until the last girl repeated the sentence she thought she’d heard, which of course was nothing like the original sentence.

Although Sophie has only lived in Sussex a scant four years, she knows that different versions of yesterday’s accident are already being passed around. She also knows that as much as she tries to avoid it, she will eventually be drawn into the gossip about what happened to Lily McNab. She will overhear a conversation in the Dominion or the post office or the church hall kitchen, where she works side by side with friendly, kind women who know she and Lily were friends. After offering condolences, they will want her to tell them what she knows. Sophie has already worked out what she will say: she will say that she did not see the accident and that she hopes justice will be done. No more than that. If anyone tries to soften her
up by being false or sentimental about Lily, she will turn a deaf ear. She will not contribute a word to gossip pretending to be the truth.

Claudia awakens to the welcome sound of morning rain. The heat wave has broken and cool air seeps beneath the window carrying the sour odour of lilacs long past their bloom. The odour reminds Claudia of the lilacs that grew behind the rented duplex in Dartmouth where their family lived when she was a girl. A strip of crippled birch separated the scruffy yard from the sorry excuse for a stream that meandered for miles before petering out. How old was she then? Nine. In Grade Four. Their family moved so often Claudia kept track of her age by grade.

Not a sound from the purple spare room. Either her father got up earlier and made his way to the kitchen without her hearing, or he is still asleep. Her wristwatch shows ten o’clock which is late for an early riser like her dad. Claudia tiptoes to the bathroom carrying yesterday’s clothes. She splashes cold water on her face, pulls a brush through her hair, her own brush, not her mother’s, which is in a basket beneath the sink. In the kitchen she opens one cupboard door after another looking for coffee before locating it inside the fridge. She makes the coffee and looks around for her cigarettes which she finds in the handbag beside the living room sofa. She lights a Pall Mall and, opening a kitchen window, is careful to blow the smoke outside—her father gave up smoking when her mother developed recurring pneumonia and she doesn’t want to be
responsible for him starting up again. Leonard complains about the smell of tobacco on her lips and hair but Claudia has no intention of giving up cigarettes, mostly because she relies on smoking to keep from gaining weight. Not that she’s fat. Far from it. Although big-breasted and wide-hipped, her bum isn’t flabby and her waist is trim. Leonard calls her his odalisque and has drawn her body many times over.

Leonard waylaid Claudia after an art history class he was teaching to ask if she would pose for an off-campus, night school drawing class. Too self-conscious to stand naked in front of strangers, at first Claudia refused but Leonard persisted. It isn’t you the students will be drawing, he told her, it’s your body. You can learn to separate yourself from your body by thinking of something else; successful models are well paid for being able to separate themselves from their bodies, and you will be well paid.

Foxy Leonard: his predatory eye had seen the body beneath the baggy sweaters and pants Claudia habitually wore when shelving library books. She never did learn to separate herself from her body because after the third class, a serial voyeur began telephoning her apartment. There were five women and three men in the class and Claudia had no way of knowing which man was the heavy breather and, quitting the modelling class, she delisted her telephone number.

Hal hears his daughter moving around the apartment. He knows that eventually he will have to get up, but he is in no hurry, especially now that it is raining. The rain tapping on the
roof reminds him of the honeymoon week he and Lily spent at Summerville Beach, the hours they spent lying in bed listening to the rain on the cottage roof, alternately making love and sleeping. Those were good times, happy times, and Hal plays them over and over again in his mind.

There is a tap on the door and his daughter pokes her head in the room. “Oh, it’s you,” Hal says.

Who was her father expecting? Claudia tells him that Matt called from Moncton to say he will be here in an hour. “Remember? He left Calgary yesterday and spent the night in Halifax.”

“I’ll get up,” Hal says, and after changing from his pajamas, he is soon on his way to the kitchen. Like Claudia, he is wearing yesterday’s clothes and appears in the kitchen doorway just as Claudia is extinguishing a Pall Mall. “Coffee, Dad?”