The Ladies' Lending Library (32 page)

But Sonia doesn’t answer immediately. She is studying her reflection in the mirror, the hang of the gingham shirtwaist she’s wearing. Sasha can’t help herself; she cries out, “For heaven’s sake, Sonia, can’t you stop worrying what you look like and give just five minutes of your attention to helping me prevent a colossal balls-up? Do you have any idea of what will happen if those two are allowed to get away with it? And don’t ask what; you know better than I do.”

In her ridiculously girlish dress, her face pale and her eyes burning, Sonia turns to her friend. For Sasha is her friend—her best, most trusted friend, and she is about to ruin this friendship, the way her beautiful golden dress has been ruined, beyond any wearing.

“From what Peter told me, Sasha, he’s in no condition to think of anything but saving his job and keeping himself from throwing in the towel. He isn’t the fool he pretends to be, you know. My brother’s in a bad way, Sasha. I’ve never been so worried about him—he’s much more likely to drive into a transport truck on the way home from the cottage than to run off with Nadia Senchenko. Nadia’s no fool, either—what could Peter offer her that she would want to take, that would make up for what she’d lose if she walked out on Jack?”

“Jack doesn’t have anything to do with this any more. Listen, Sonia, I’ve talked to Nadia—not that she’s gone into True Confessions—as a matter of fact it’s what she’s not saying that worries me. Sonia, Sonia, a lot of people could get hurt—a lot of things are at stake here. I know Zirka’s a royal pain, but there are the boys, too—and all this on top of Nettie Shkurka. Dear God, what’s happening to us all?”

Sonia hasn’t time now to consider Nettie Shkurka, or her nephews; she’s too afraid for her brother, afraid he’ll miss this chance just as he’s messed up every other. “Look, I’ll bet you anything that he’s still at our place, telling the boys one of his crazy stories. They’re spending the night in the sleep-house, so Darka can keep an eye on them. I’ll go over there now, and see.”

“Just don’t say anything to Zirka—she’s like a Molotov cocktail waiting to be thrown.”

Sonia nods: she is about to go off when Sasha grabs her by the sleeve.

“Listen very carefully, Soniu. If Peter and Nadia are having an affair, that’s their business, so long as no one else finds out, and Jack and Zirka don’t have to do anything about it—in public, I mean. So you find your brother, and hold onto him—don’t let him out of your sight. I’ll go after Nadia, I’ll sit on her if I have to, or drag her down to the party where she belongs. She’s the hostess, goddammit! Tomorrow we all go back to the city and everything will blow over, and things will go on the way they always have.”

Sonia removes Sasha’s arm from her own—she has grabbed her so hard that a seam has split in her sleeve. Ruined dresses; ruined lives—suddenly Sonia comes as close as she can to risking all.

“What if they don’t want things to go on as usual? What if they want everything to change, what if they don’t care who gets hurt? What if it hurts them much, much more to stay apart than to go off together?”

Someone’s pounding on the washroom door. Sasha yells out, “This house has six bathrooms and you have to use this one?
Hai shlyakh tebeh trafyt!
” Then she addresses Sonia, slowly and sternly. “Peter and Nadia aren’t movie stars; they’re only people, like you and me. They’re a part of us, they belong here, they can’t
be allowed to do something they’ll regret the morning after—something that will rip this whole community into shreds. Now promise me you’ll fetch Peter while I look for Nadia.”

Sonia nods and Sasha puts her hands on her shoulders, affectionately. “Dab on a bit of lipstick, Sonia—you look like a ghost.”

The two women emerge from the bathroom, Sonia heading in the direction of the sleep-house while Sasha searches the den, the kitchen, the dining room, the bedrooms and washrooms upstairs, even the huge veranda with its boxes of moonstruck geraniums. Nadia is nowhere to be found. Sasha returns to the party, joking with everyone, being outrageous in her usual way and keeping her eyes peeled for the delinquent lovers. Shortly after ten, a half-drunken Zirka comes raging towards her, mascara running and huge half-moons of sweat showing under her arms. She, too, has been going from room to room, looking for her husband, looking for Nadia; now she is gunning for Jack. She’ll tell him everything, she swears, the whole dirty secret.

Somehow, Sasha manages to lead her off to one of the guest bedrooms, grabbing a bottle of vodka from a table as she goes. She pours Zirka a huge dose of what she calls medicine, and Zirka gulps it down with the resignation of a sick child. Sasha holds her hand and waits for her to fall asleep, murmuring, “There there, there there.” What she feels for the woman beside her, face streaked with makeup, hands clutching the edge of the covers, is exasperation mixed with sorrow. For Zirka, after all, has played her part in the community of Kalyna Beach: she had gone to take care of Nettie that afternoon, and she’d gone on the warpath after Peter this evening. He is her husband, after all—she has a perfect right to light into him, keep him from—.

Sasha lights a cigarette, which she holds in the hand with which
she’s cupping her forehead, her elbow on her knee. It is her posture of defeat, of resignation. She knows by now that Sonia’s betrayed her: all she can do now is to delay the public discovery, try to stem the damage. For there will be damage, she has no doubt about that. In her mind’s eye, she can see a string of divorces, small at first, like a scrap of thread, and then longer, and thicker, till it extends so far there’s no way of telling where it will end.

Zirka sighs in her sleep. She’s out, all right—she might as well spend the night here, since the boys are sleeping at Sonia’s. Sasha takes a long drag on her dwindled cigarette, then stubs it out and leaves the room, turning out all the lamps but a night light shaped like a seahorse.

Close to midnight, Laura gets out of bed. She reaches between the mattress and the box springs and pulls out the long, thin package she’s hidden there. Bonnie and Katia and Alix are fast asleep, and there’s no light coming from the sleep-house. Darka has gone to her room, having spent most of the evening in front of the cracked mirror in the bathroom, teasing and brushing out and teasing again her dyed-back hair. Laura knows that her parents will return before long: if she’s going to go through with her plan, it has to be now. She has spent the whole evening working out a way to set things right, so that even the terrible blue eye painted on the dome of the cathedral back home will see that she’s tried to make up for what’s happened, for the fact that it’s been all her fault.

When, after supper—when no one but their father and Alix had eaten anything of the meal set down on their plates—Sonia had gone to her bedroom to dress for the Senchenkos’ party, Laura had risen from the table to follow her. She had waited outside the door, imagining Sonia reaching into the very back of the closet, pulling out the
dress and—. But nothing like what Laura had imagined had happened: there had been one sharp cry, and then silence. Laura had waited for what seemed like forever, and then fled to the sitting room, where Katia was reading the same page of
The Mystery of Larkspur Lane
that she’d been working on since supper. Tato was complaining, in a joking way, about how long it always took their mother to get ready for a party, making his daughters promise never to torture their husbands like this. And then, at last, Sonia had come out of the bedroom, in the dress she wore to go on family outings to Santa’s Village or to visit the Martyr’s Shrine at Midland. Her old pink gingham dress with the dirndl skirt and the three-quarter-length sleeves.

All of them had stared at her, unable to say a word, even Tato. And she had stared back, but in a way that made it clear she didn’t really see them. Her face was white and pinched, and her eyes like lightning: not the way they usually were, wet with tears she only just kept from falling, but dry and terribly, terribly bright. No one said anything about her dress, or her face; everyone was waiting for an explosion, or at least an explanation. But all she told them was not to give Darka any trouble, as she walked out the door, with their father shrugging at them and following close after her. It had been worse, a thousand times worse, than what Laura had foreseen down at the beach.

A light burns in the main room, but there’s no one here. No one to witness Laura reaching up to the brass jar on the mantelpiece, taking out a box of matches and bending down to the hearth with the package she’s locked under her arm. The wrapper is one of the brown paper bags in which she’d carried groceries home from Venus Variety; before she opens it, she smooths the paper with her palm. And then she draws out what’s inside, slowly, carefully, as if it were alive.

But it’s not, of course. It doesn’t breathe or speak or smile, or weep. It’s just a pile of paper, stapled and printed, filled with paragraphs and photographs and, on the cover, a painting of two men standing on opposite sides of a woman with beaded, braided hair, sitting on a throne. The men are peering down at the woman with expressions of awe and adoration on their faces. The woman looks straight ahead, the beautiful woman in her magnificent blue-and-gold gown, staring blankly into the distance, holding a golden crook and sceptre in her arms.

It takes forever to burn. As usual, Laura admits to herself, she’s made a mess of things. The first two matches flare and die away without so much as scorching the paper. She has to reach into the cinders and bits of charred log on the grate, and tear up the book; to do it all at once proves impossible; she must work page by glossy page. She must ignite the scraps with one lit match and a dozen others that she scatters nearby. Her hands are grimy now; there’s a nasty smell from the photographs. Laura had thought they would burn as vividly as the colours they contain, but the pictures vanish in the same, sour flame as the white paper, the black words. She sits for a long time, stirring the chunks of charred paper with the poker, making even more of a mess of herself and the hearth in the process.

She is not just burning Cleopatra and her lovers. She is burning Nettie Shkurka’s steel-toothed comb and the boys who threw a frightened girl into a muddy river and left her to drown. She is burning the way she betrayed Katia and Yuri’s secret, and the way she’d pushed Bonnie away that morning at the beach. But even when the Souvenir Booklet has turned to ash, and the ash has been pounded into dust, nothing has really been destroyed. Nor has anything been saved. Laura feels neither relief from guilt nor
any lessening of pain. The sacrifice has all been for nothing. But that, she realizes, is why it’s a sacrifice, and not a bargain.

There’s a small, shuffling sound behind her; Laura wheels round to find Bonnie, in her nightie with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves printed over it, for once not a hand-me-down from her older sisters but a Christmas gift that’s still almost as good as new. Bonnie doesn’t say a word: she comes to where Laura is kneeling and sits down beside her, staring into the hearth. She waits a while and then offers her own small sacrifice.

“I’m sorry I pulled at you down at the beach this morning. I’m sorry, Laura.”

Laura takes the poker and hits at the ash. “Go back to sleep, Bonnie,” she says. “You get into my bed—I’ll be there in a minute.”

Only as Bonnie shuffles back to bed do tears start rolling down Laura’s cheeks. She pulls off her glasses and shoves her palms into her eyes; she keeps her mouth shut, for fear of Bonnie coming back to her. What is she weeping for? Not just for Nastia, and for the child that Sonia was. Not only for Bonnie, burdened with the need to keep peace between her sisters, with the need to love them all. But also for herself, and for what she’ll turn out to be. For she knows, now, who and what she is: her own self, however ugly and awful and stubborn she may be. And she knows how close she’d come that afternoon, folded in Sonia’s arms, in the warmth of her lap, to giving herself to the World of the Mothers.

Sonia watches the car drive away from the Metelskys’ cottage, bumping and rattling over the patchy asphalt of Tunnel Road. She hugs herself, as if it were an autumn night and she’d come out to look at the moon without a sweater. There is a moon, three-quarters full,
gleaming foggily through rags of cloud that seem to hang in the air instead of drifting by, as if something had happened to the mechanism of the universe, and the earth had stopped turning, the winds forgotten to blow. And then Sonia shakes herself. “Don’t be such a fool,” she says out loud. Words that Sasha had told her to say to Peter, words of warning, pleading, scorn and reproach waiting to pour themselves out, words surging up from the imagination of disaster.

What is it but the unexpectedness, the mystery of any life, that makes it possible to go on at all? The chances that perch like birds singing on a branch, or that whirl up like dust in your eyes: that a stranger might see your photo in a newspaper ad, and declare to himself that he will marry you; that a child will fall so ill on the eve of a life-changing journey that she will be abandoned by her parents; that a spider-shaped cluster of veins will burst in your brain just as you are about to enjoy some small share of happiness, after so many years away from your wife and children and country? A mystery, yes, but not like the detective novel she’s finally finished reading, with its suddenly simple answers to appallingly complicated puzzles. It’s more like a fog that appears just when you think things are fixed and certain, a fog that shakes and blurs, gently or harshly, all the firm, dark edges.

She doesn’t know where Peter and Nadia will go, what they will do, how they will live with all they’ll have lost, and what they will make, together. If they fail, she tells herself, it will be worse, far worse than if the car they are driving out of Kalyna Beach should crash on the highway. And then she stops herself, steps back, examines, like a colt upon shaky legs, the field of possibilities in front of them. Would it really be worse, failure? Must it be so? Isn’t there a chance of something emerging from this
risky, haphazard escape that will be, if not better than what’s gone before, then different? Different enough for an ending that, even if it isn’t happy, could still be alive, could still be open?