The Ladies' Lending Library (10 page)

“You saw that performance Zirka just put on,” Sasha begins. “Why was she on the attack like that—in public, in front of the whole damn Lending Library, for Christ’s sake? She’s had a whole week to ask Nadia what was going on between her and Peter—if there was anything going on, that is, other than Peter being even more of an idiot than he always is.”

“Don’t, Sasha. You don’t know him, you don’t understand—”

“All I understand is that Zirka’s onto something that we’ve been too stupid, or too lazy, to notice. She may not be a rocket scientist, but she’s nobody’s fool. She’s nosed something out between Nadia and Peter and she wants us to know about it—wants Nadia to know that we know. She’s made that clear enough.”

“He got a little drunk, that’s all,” Sonia says. “He got a little drunk, and he started acting, the way he always does. For God’s sake, Sasha, it’s been twenty years—”

“Eighteen, by my reckoning. But forget Peter for a moment. Let’s focus on Nadia. For her to have acted so out of character, to
have shown her feelings like that—she might as well have blown a trumpet or shouted from the rooftops, as slap Peter’s face.”

“Doesn’t that just go to show it was all a joke, just like Peter’s ham-acting?”

Sasha puts her hands to her head. “I wish I could believe that, Sonechko, I wish I had the least goddam clue as to what is going on here. Nadia hasn’t been herself all summer—since before the summer. She’s always been so remote, so perfectly controlled. And Peter—if he’d just been drunk and full of himself, he would have thrown himself at me, or Annie, or even Zirka. But he went after Nadia. He went out of his way to make a fool of himself and a spectacle of Jack Senchenko’s wife.”

“You’re starting to sound like Zirka,” Sonia says.

“Don’t I know it,” Sasha moans. “But listen, Sonechko, you’ve got to help me with this: it’s important.”

Sonia nods, and Sasha speaks, but her words drift about Sonia’s head like the furred parachutes of dandelion seeds. Sasha has given her a headache with her cigarettes and suggestions. The only way to keep her balance is to think of something else, which she manages to do, though it doesn’t keep her head from hurting. A picture of the broken statue flashes into her mind, or rather, the moment of the statue’s breaking, the moment it started to fall from its place on the mantelpiece, the lines along which it would smash already shivering. And then, on its heels, comes an image of Baba Motria’s
kylym,
woven back in the old country and transported, at such cost and trouble and for such small purpose, to the new. Sonia has always hated that
kylym.
Max’s mother had given it to her just before she died, expecting it to be hung in the place of honour on the living room wall. Instead, Sonia had laid it down in the rec room, where the children had worn holes in it,
driving their tricycles over it. Max has never said a word about the banishment of the
kylym:
he too dislikes it. There is something so constricted about the weave, so dismal about the black background and the pink and orange roses—for all the world like two-day-old funeral flowers.

Sonia is holding the two things in her head: the shattered plaster statue, so frivolous in its uselessness and fragility, and the rugged, worn
kylym,
shelved in the basement. It will outlive them all, she thinks, its weave as strong as her memory of the river in the Old Place, the deadly urgency of its current.

“Do you get it now, Sonia? Do you understand why this is so important?” Sasha is pleading once again, this time almost angrily.

Sonia nods, yes, oh yes, though to what, exactly, she really can’t say. Speak to Peter: of course she will speak to Peter, this very weekend.

“I have to go,” she says, moving to the door, putting her hand on the latch.

Once down the veranda steps and back on Tunnel Road, she exhales deeply, as if it had been she, not Sasha, lighting up.

Darka’s curlers are the hard kind, filled with stiff bristles and fastened with plastic pins like bayonets, for all they’re such a pallid pink. She’d wanted foam rubber; it was too expensive, her mother said, but that wasn’t the real reason—Darka holds out her hand, scrutinizing fingernails naked as earthworms—the real reason was that her mother had wanted to punish her.
Wait till you have a daughter and she goes wild and breaks your heart, after all you’ve dreamed for her, done for her.

What’s the point? Who is here to look at her fingernails except
Sonia, who’d have a fit if Darka were to paint them up? She might as well have shaved her head as bleached her hair—who is there to care? Dead and buried, that’s what she is; she might as well throw herself into the lake, walk out into the water with a ball and chain around her leg. At home they’ll all be going to the Hot Spot for Cherry Cokes and cheeseburgers tonight: if she were home, Jamie would pick her up in his red convertible, his black-and-white dog in the back seat, the radio blasting. They’d drive all over town and she wouldn’t get home till after one. She’d have to sneak into her room by climbing the fence and then jumping up into the Manitoba maple right outside her window. All the next day her mother would walk around with swollen eyeballs, showing off how she’s been sobbing her heart out over her wayward daughter. Olya doesn’t need to worry, make herself sick over nothing; if she had half a brain she’d know that. But how can Darka tell her? There’s no language between them any more, no shared hopes or plans, however much Darka wants to escape from the kind of life her mother’s led, and however much Olya dreams of a future for her daughter, a life not dissimilar, in fact, to Sonia Martyn’s.

Darka drums with her fists on her thighs, then pushes her palms over the cloth of her shorts, fingers outspread like powerboats, idling. She thinks of the city, how good she feels with the hardness of pavement under her feet, and a thousand shop windows to pore over when she skips a day off school and walks around downtown for hours on end. She is thinking of the attention she gets, not just wolf whistles but looks of interest, admiration from men in costly suits and well-cut sports jackets. All of a sudden, Darka smiles; her pretty face burns with something like beauty. All because of this feeling she has, more than a hunch, a glow that starts in her toes and spreads itself through her whole body. Sometimes she
feels it give off this golden hum as she’s walking down the street or into a room, or when she just sits, as she’s doing now, waiting. The golden hum tells her she is somebody special, that no harm can ever come to her, that wonderful things are about to happen. She won’t end up in a dump on Bathurst, like her mother; she’s headed for far-off places, she’ll wear orchids and a snakeskin dress; men will leap to light her cigarette in its ebony holder. Lean, handsome men always at her elbow, lighters clicking, her face reflected in their eyes, in the satin trim of their dinner jackets.

Nonsense, her mother calls it, dime-novel romance, nothing but daydreaming. Sonia’s word for it is
loafing;
she’s always on at her for loafing on her bed with her movie magazines. Loafing! When all she wants, Darka assures herself, is to work: real work for real pay. She could have got that job at the Hot Spot: she could have made big money this summer instead of the pennies Sonia’s doling out, not to her, but to Olya, to spend on school supplies and a new uniform for Darka’s last year at Saint Demetrius. Why didn’t they just slap her in reform school, instead? Good as jail here—nothing to do except slave over a washtub or a sink and run after the kids, rude, mouthy, even the baby a handful. Alix hardly ever sleeps for more than an hour in the afternoon, and it spooks her sometimes, the kid never talking, never making a sound, hardly even laughing or crying—and they think
she’s
dumb just because she failed her year!

When Darka had bleached her hair, Sonia lit into her as if she’d robbed a bank.
Beauty’s only skin deep; men look for more than glamour in a woman; sex isn’t everything; you want to be looking out for a respectable man, the steady kind that talks marriage.
Well, she’s not even thinking about getting married yet, she has a life—doesn’t anyone here understand that? She’d rather die than
marry a lawyer or accountant and be buried with a pack of kids at a cottage for eight weeks every summer. They think they’re so smart with their advice, and their frowns, and the click-cluck of their tongues. They think they know everything and they haven’t a clue. She’ll show them, won’t she just? But how, marooned as she is among mothers and children? She could have been spending the summer with Jamie Ashford. She says his name aloud, loving the Englishness of it, the soft cadence of the normal-sounding name. He knows her as Darlene. She’s never told him her last name: she’s never had to. All he has to do is look at her and she can feel his eyes turn into the warm palms of his hands, sliding over her shoulders, down to her breasts.

Darka sinks back against the sofa, as deep as the curlers will allow. Closing her eyes, she puts both hands to her face, the bones of her cheeks and jaw, the roundness of her throat. She holds her breasts, stroking them with her thumbs through the thin cotton, as if they were her only friends in all the world, the only ones who understand her and love her no matter what she does.
All golden, orchids,
his lighter so close that if she were to stick out her tongue instead of the cigarette she would catch fire, burn, burn up altogether.

A candy on the pillow beside her: a red candy, smaller than the nail on her baby finger. Alix touches it so gently she can hardly tell if it’s smooth or sticky. Candy hearts her sisters give her—
stick out your tongue
—laying them on the very tip. She has to flick them into her mouth so they don’t drop in the dirt.
Never, ever eat things that fall on the floor, they’re poison.

Poi-son.
Ot-ru-ta.
Heart
. Ser-tseh.
Red.
Cher-vo-na.
Alix watches the words fly in pairs, English and Ukrainian, across the sky inside her head. Where her mouth is, there’s a window,
dangerous;
the
birds think they can fly through it, they throw themselves so hard against the glass they break their wings and have to limp back to their roosting place. Pulling their heads in small, so small that no one can find them.

On her pillow a candy, like a cinnamon heart, the kind that burns on your tongue. A candy, but no sugar smell like the one her mother sprays on her neck; she pushes the pump, a cloud comes out and makes a smell like candy. This one has black spots so small she has to blink to see them, pushing with her finger. It stops being a candy: hairs shoot out its sides, black hairs like the ones round your eyes. Alix watches the red spot push itself up her finger, tickling her skin. Lets it crawl up one finger to the finger on her other hand, climbing up and over, like on the monkey bars at the school when they’re waiting for Bonnie. Up to her arm, meeting the fence her finger makes, and down again, and up and down. Till she holds it to her mouth and blows, gently. Two small, dark scarves shoot out from the red, a buzzing sound, and it’s gone, her finger bare now, nothing.

If she knew its name she could call it back. When her mother wants them she calls and they have to come; even if they run away, their names catch up with them. Names can’t catch you till you say them out loud; you must never, never let them go, you must keep them safe inside, heads tucked tight, blind, under their wings. But that small, red crawling thing—not a fly, flies buzz—she wants it back, she wants to keep it. Pushing down off the bed, her feet meeting the sand on the floor. Little lines up and down all over the windows, little squares where the flies crawl, they get trapped inside; Katia squishes them with her bare fingers.
Katia, that’s dis-gus-ting.
Not
fly,
not
mukha,
that’s not its name. When she finds it she’ll hold out her finger, whisper it back to her
hand: carry her hand to her mouth, and the thing will step with its small, small feet onto her tongue; she’ll close her mouth and keep it forever, flying inside her.

Darka and Laura hear it at the same time, through different walls: a crashing sound from the baby’s room, smack of wood against wood. Darka jumps up from the sofa and runs to where Baby Alix has fallen from the chair she’s dragged to the window. Darka holds her and lets her wail, a gush of sound you could almost mistake for words; maybe it’s the way she speaks, thinks Darka, singing to her, taking the baby’s hands and clapping them together:
toshi, toshi, toshi, svynya v horodi.
Till the child forgets what she’s crying for, listening to the nursery rhyme, watching the face of the grown-up girl, the girl who talks and talks and talks, words flapping out her mouth, disappearing forever.

Laura stays frozen in her mother’s room, sitting on the floor, her back against the bed, the scissors gleaming in her lap. At the sound of the crash, the scissors forgot the small nick they were taking out of the tight, white stitch; they jabbed into the cloth, fine and slippery as her hair but golden, shining. Now there’s a hole she can never patch up. Alix keeps wailing, sounds flooding out of the mouth that makes Laura think of the mail slot in the front door at home, not a mouth at all, not something that belongs to Alix’s body, but something hard and metallic stamped down on her. Darka’s heavy footsteps, the door to Alix’s room banging shut, and then Darka singing nonsense rhymes, making baby-talk against the baby’s silence, now that the shock is over.

So it wasn’t Sonia coming home, the smash she’s heard: but what does it matter? As soon as she does comes home, she’ll know. If Sonia went crazy about the breaking of a useless statue, then she will kill Laura over the dress, just for taking it off its
hanger. Laura grips the scissors in her sweaty hands; now that she’s started she’s got to finish; maybe her mother won’t notice the foam cups are gone, maybe she’ll think it looks better this way. Laura stabs the blade into the tight white stitches, breaking them one by one, breaking their little necks. Until at last the foam falls into her lap, and the dress stops being a dress, is just a pool of something bright, a loose skin that can hardly cling to its hanger as she shoves it to the back of the closet.