The Ladies' Lending Library (23 page)

That rough, sudden silence as he hits the water, the breath nearly knocked out of him. Somehow he is swimming out to her, strong, swift strokes, though each wave is a glass door to be crashed through, over and over. The look on Nadia’s face as he approaches: not terrified, but pitiless, that is what amazes him. As if, instead of reaching out to grab hold of him, she is inviting him to come drown with her. Somehow he hoists her on his back, somehow he manages to swim back with her to where the boat is waiting, its lack of noise as jolting as its stink of gasoline. His arms round her waist, her thighs; hoisting her up to Jack who hauls her in, one eye on the shore—who is watching, what has been seen? An accident, of course: disobeying the rules, standing up in a speeding boat. Who wouldn’t have fallen in, entirely, irresponsibly, by accident?

Anyone who thinks otherwise, Sonia had protested, has been reading too much Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. Or watching films like
Cleopatra,
reading the movie magazines Darka’s addicted to and that Sonia confiscates, which she only manages to do when Darka leaves them lying about like empty banana peels. Sonia doesn’t want her daughters coming across such trash, she tells herself: she doesn’t, however, throw the magazines out, but takes them down the road to her sister-in-law, as a guilt offering. For Sonia has failed in her sisterly role: failed wholeheartedly. She doesn’t invite Zirka over for coffee or dinner, not when Max and Peter are here for the weekends, and certainly not when they’re off in the city. She does her best to ignore Zirka both on the beach and on Sasha’s veranda. And she isn’t nearly as attentive to her nephews as she might be. Her excuse is that she knows nothing about boys, which, as Zirka points out to her, is nonsense: didn’t she grow up with a brother, after all?

There’s much that Sonia could say by way of reply to this question, should she so choose. The fact is that she’s reserved, or, as Zirka likes to put it, cold, proud, and holier-than-thou. Very much like Nadia, as a matter of fact, but without the inestimable advantage, as Zirka sees it, of being married to Jack Senchenko. Still, Sonia brings her sister-in-law the movie magazines with which Darka had filled her suitcase on coming up to the cottage. Zirka, of course, would rather die than be seen buying a
Hollywood Stars
or
Movie Times;
she has her reputation to think of, after all. Movie magazines are for ignorant sixteen-year-olds like Darka, and not for sophisticated married women, the mothers of sons. Still, she’s not averse to thumbing through the copies Sonia hands over without a kiss or a hug since, as everyone knows, it’s the worst kind of luck to embrace across a threshold.

On this evening, as on all the others, Sonia refuses Zirka’s invitation to come in for tea and honey cake: she has to get back to the children, she says. As usual, Zirka warns her sister-in-law that she’ll wear herself down to nothing if she doesn’t eat. The
medivnyk
Sonia’s just refused is one of the specialities Zirka is famous for; pepper and rum are the secret ingredients—not that Sonia would care to find out, she is the only person Zirka’s ever met who seems to be allergic to the very thought of food. She’s not skinny, exactly—Nadia Senchenko’s skinny—but Sonia has a perfect figure, if you like small-breasted women, that is. She seems immune to age, childbirth and the bad habits induced by motherhood. Zirka has just finished her own dinner and the half that Yuri left on his plate before running outdoors to meet the Vesiuk boys, who are waiting for him on the porch.

So it’s with Andriy, her youngest, her favourite, that Zirka sits down to tea and slightly boozy honey cake. He leafs through the old
Maclean’s
that have piled up on the end tables, while she goes for one of the magazines Sonia’s brought her, the one with
SYBIL’S ANGUISH
in letters two inches high on the cover. She’s a terribly impatient reader, Zirka: she can’t follow any kind of plot or argument, but looks through each article for what she calls “items” she can lift and plunk into whatever context pleases her. What she’s gleaned from the cover story reassures her. Mrs. Richard Burton, it would seem, has been through this kind of emotional tornado before: her husband may be notorious for “forming attachments” with his leading ladies, but—and Zirka straightens her spine as she reads this—he always comes home to his wife and two kids and “the life he has made with them”—that “made” sounding to Zirka’s ears like the making of bread or borshcht, something serious, beneficial, nourishing for all concerned.

But it’s the feature on the current cause of Sybil’s Anguish that Zirka saves for the moment she’s alone at last, once Andriy has had his bath and been tucked into bed, and Yuri’s come home from his visit with his friends. The visit has made him impossible: slamming doors, refusing to answer when spoken to, sticking out his tongue. “Your father will hear about your behaviour when he comes up on Friday, don’t think I—” but Yuri’s slammed yet another door, cutting off his mother in mid-sentence. “And don’t wake your brother,” she yells, as if Andriy were a cranky newborn instead of an eleven-year-old known for the soundness of his sleep and the mildness of his disposition. Zirka shakes her head, cuts herself another big piece of
medivnyk,
stirs two spoons of sugar into her tea, and curls up in her nightie on the sagging sofa.

Elizabeth Taylor: Starlight All the Way!
reads the title of the longest story in the magazine, stretching far beyond the centre page, with plenty of the glamour shots that Zirka loves. There’s something so glossy, creamy, sweet and sumptuous about the photographs—they make her think of pale-pink-and-green meringues, or the sugar roses on a birthday cake. She devours the pictures: from teenage starlet to teenage bride, from wife to divorcee to widow to wife; from El Mocambo to Egypt and the set of
Cleopatra.
Of course she knows what some gossip columnist once wrote: “There isn’t a woman alive who doesn’t want to look like Elizabeth Taylor, or a man who doesn’t want to sleep with her.” Zirka brings the magazine closer to her face; stares at the beautifully arched brows and the dripping, violet eyes. Well, she’s the one in a zillion, she tells herself. She wouldn’t want to look like Elizabeth Taylor; not for anything would she want to look like that temptress, seductress, man-eater.

It’s not, she decides, letting the magazine fall from her hands and picking cake crumbs from the nylon of her nightie, the
looks
she’s after. It’s the life—the life! For, as she has just learned, never, ever has Elizabeth Taylor had to wash a dish, iron a dress, slice an onion, take out the garbage or rinse a stinky diaper—though it’s true, she has a zoo of pets who run in and out of the house, leaving God knows what kind of a mess behind. The point is, Liz Taylor never has to pick up after anyone, even herself. It can take her three hours to put on her makeup and get dressed for a party; as for her jewellery, she’s got diamonds bigger than her boobs, from what the story says.

Zirka doesn’t bother looking down to the ring digging into her finger: Peter had to borrow the money for the diamond from Jack, and even so, it’s no bigger than a baby tooth. Grace Kelly got a friendship ring of diamonds and rubies just for posing for a magazine cover with Prince Rainier. He was no looker, that’s for sure, but then what do a man’s good looks do for the wife in the picture? What had they done for Sybil Burton—or, more importantly, for Zirka Metelsky? It’s just as Father Myron has told her, over and over again: marriage is a cross to be carried the way you carry home loads of groceries or carry baskets of laundry from the basement to the yard. Unless you’re Elizabeth Taylor, that is, and can simply let go of what you’re lugging, let it crash to the ground and walk away as if the law of gravity applied to everyone and everything but you.

If you’re a Hollywood star you can do exactly what you want, whenever you want, with anyone who takes your fancy. If you’re Zirka Metelsky, née Senchenko, you’re stuck with the bed you’ve made, the stew you’ve cooked—there’s no getting rid of the mistakes ringing your neck, higher and higher. Zirka Senchenko, she’d been once:
senchenko,
another word for millionaire,
zirka,
meaning star. Some starlight she’d stumbled on, marrying a man with pockets like sieves and an allergy to an honest day’s work—or a dishonest day’s, at that!
Liz and Dick: The Romance of the Century.
If Jack hadn’t been there to care of things, if Jack hadn’t stepped in, again and again, to make sure the Metelskys didn’t end up on the rubbish heap—

Two boys, she’d produced; two bouncing boys, unlike that tribe of girls with which Sonia’s stuck Max Martyn. Four girls to marry off! Forever giving herself airs, Sonia, with her delicate this and her fragile that, and the headaches—not common garden headaches but
migraines
—she brings on herself. Elizabeth Taylor—now
she’s
a delicate one, what with the meningitis and the pneumonia, the crushed disks in her back, the tracheotomy. You could see the scar on her neck, the article said, when she limped up to get her Academy Award, limped up on crutches—although, Zirka recalls, the cleavage was completely unassisted, no doubt about that. Well, who is she to fault a pair of knockers—isn’t that her own strong suit? Zirka of the over-the-shoulder boulder-holder. If Peter had fallen for some Daisy Mae type, if he’d even tried to feel up Darka—and the way that girl flaunts herself she wouldn’t be surprised if all the husbands up for the weekends have got the hots for her—well, she could handle that. But to carry the torch for Nadia Moroz, that holy-holy titless wonder of a Mrs. Magoo!

Tears are rolling down Zirka’s plump, flushed cheeks; tears are soaking into the faded pink of her nightie and onto the crumpled pages of
Hollywood Stars.
She lies back on the scratchy sofa, remembering the time she first met Peter, when Jack had brought him home for supper and he’d fallen on the food she’d prepared like a famished man, lavish not just with appetite but with compliments. Remembering but rearranging those memories so that
she appears thinner, prettier, and Peter attentive, if not downright smitten, calling her
Zirochko moya.
She hugs herself, and mops her face and falls asleep with the lamp still burning, only to wake an hour later in the thick of a dream.

She is standing naked, on the corner of Bloor and Yonge; naked except for a stack of wide golden rings around her neck, forcing her chin up from her goggling breasts, higher and higher until she can’t see the ground at her feet any more, or the people passing by, gawking and laughing at her. She can’t see her husband’s dark, handsome head walking straight past her, walking away from her, whistling as he always does. Not walking but running, running away from her, she knows this, knows exactly how far he will get from her, though all she can see, all the rings around her neck force her to keep seeing is the bright blue sky overhead—not clear, not cloudless, but like her head now that the dream has flashed through it: aching and empty.

All families have hierarchies of the heart: from the moment Andriy was born he was Zirka’s joy. In Zirka’s defence, you had to admit that there never was and never could be any sweeter baby, boy or girl. Andriy’s huge blue eyes and the blond buttercup curl on top of his head enchanted everyone; instead of turning to dirty blond as he grew up, his hair stayed flaxen and curly, so that his mother hadn’t had the heart to cut it short. Alone of all the boys at Kalyna Beach that summer, Andriy sports no crewcut, but wears his hair long—almost as long as Darka’s pageboy.

Andriy has spent much of his time in Zirka’s company: he happily helps her to do housework, vacuuming being his specialty. He can be counted on, his mother claims, never to vacuum up the
littlest Lego pieces, or the buttons, safety pins and paper clips that somehow, always, find their way to the floor. He is a careful boy who likes to please, whereas Yuri has been a troublemaker from the time he was born. When Sonia considers her nephews she tells herself to be glad she’s only had girls: Yuri is so wild and rough and always getting into mischief, a hundred times worse than Katia. And Andriy, though he’s so milky-mild—oh, she doesn’t know, but she would have found it shameful to have turned any son of hers into a mother’s help.

There is nothing to vacuum at the cottage. The floors are swept of sand every night, but that is Zirka’s job, when the boys have gone to bed for the night. She insists that both boys go down with her to the beach every morning and afternoon, in spite of Andriy’s protests that he’d really be happier reading comics at the kitchen table; she wants to make sure that her sons remember this summer at Kalyna Beach as the happiest, most carefree time of their lives. Andriy tries very hard to give nothing away, putting on a brave face when his mother shoos him away to go play with the other boys. He hides, as best he can, the terror he always feels in the company of boys who are always pushing and shoving and pinching, daring him to hit back.

Which he will never do, for Andriy hates fighting: it sickens him. At home, watching cartoons on Saturday mornings, he would feel like throwing up when Popeye and Bluto went at it, shoving their fists in each other’s faces, tearing apart Olive Oyl’s house plank by plank. He would look up from the screen and see light pouring from the ground-level windows into the dark well in which the television flickered. And then he’d feel queasy at how they were making themselves prisoners while the whole world was waiting for them, outdoors. The daylight they hadn’t yet felt on their faces, the garden,
the grass, the praying mantis hiding among the daisies or the skin of ice on the puddles—all of it unnoticed, eclipsed, as good as dead to them. It made his breathing go shallow and his chest ache. It wasn’t that the world didn’t exist when he wasn’t outside in it, but that he didn’t exist when he wasn’t face to face with things, real things and not crude drawings of them flashing on a television screen.

The great rock on which the boys are gathered this afternoon—the Seech—is hopelessly real. Andriy sits at the very end, while Yuri stands defiantly next to the throne. For Pavlo has demanded he announce his plan, describe, at long last, the strategy of the raid the
Zaporozhtsi
are to carry out, or else to relinquish his role as Hetman. Yuri’s eyes are painfully bright; he keeps blowing out air from his bottom lip, which he makes protrude until his upper lip has vanished. It’s to keep himself still, Andriy understands: to keep himself from shouting at Pavlo; from bursting into tears at the way in which he, Yuri Metelsky, is about to be disgraced, like the great Hetman Mazeppa, beaten and tied to his horse, wandering the steppes till he dies of exposure.