The Ladies' Lending Library (7 page)

Sonia’s fingers loosen their hold on the hammock. Bees hum drowsily in the plants on either side of the porch steps; a bird calls out, making the sound of a door creaking on its hinges. She’s so grateful for this part of the day, when the children are out of her hair and nothing is expected of her. It’s too hot to do any work—leaves hang in the air outside as though suspended in syrup. If she were to lift her head and look directly out the screen, she would see the remnants of her mother’s vegetable garden. Every summer she’d come up and plant carrots and beets and lettuce for them: runner beans, garlic, dill, onions, carrots. So wouldn’t they always be running to the store, and because she couldn’t stand the sight of all this good earth going to waste. The year they bought the cottage she’d got down on her hands and knees, sixty-eight years old and yanking up weeds with her bare hands. The weeds had turned out to be poison ivy. Thank God Al Vesiuk had
been there—he’d given her something to take care of the blisters, the oozing skin.

Sonia’s eyes swim with tears: sleek, useless tears. The doctor’s given her prescription after prescription that she never fills: sleeping pills, Valium. Sometimes she thinks that the only real thing in her life, the only real thing about her, is this ragged, unquenchable grief at her mother’s death. She gets up from the hammock and goes out to sit on the steps of the porch, a lean, tanned woman in faded blue shorts and a striped tube top exposing the delicate wingbones of her back. American
Vogue.
The movies … She wipes her eyes, makes a little grimace, frowns. The porch steps are rotting—Max has been promising for the past two years to replace them.

If her father were alive … He’d been a fine carpenter in his spare time; she still had a little cupboard, a sort-of treasure chest he’d made for her as a welcome gift when she’d come to Canada, this father she’d barely known, who’d left the Old Place when she’d been little more than a baby. Who’d been rushed to hospital a week after he’d met them at Union Station, having been injured by some brutal, overefficient machine at the foundry that employed him: no safety gear, no workers’ compensation, nothing. He’d recovered, somehow—even found work again because of the war, making shell casings to blow up the
Fasheesty.
And then, after the war had ended, and life had become slower and easier, and his children had married, and he’d held his first grandchild in his arms, a blood vessel had burst in his brain and he’d died twelve hours later. Never coming back to consciousness, unable even to tell them goodbye.

Sonia sits on the rotting steps and holds her head in her hands, weeping for her father, who’d widowed her mother far too young, and for the mother who’d died before her time. A
baba
—meaning
old woman, granny—but to Sonia she was still that lonely young woman who’d read out letters from their father, letters all about the distant country where they, too, would go one day, once he’d made a home for them. A country so magical that no one used naphtha lamps and you could flood a room with light just by pushing a button! How could any of them have known how long it would take for them all to be together again, what with the Depression starting so soon after he’d crossed the ocean to that place that had sounded like the name of a kind of candy:
Kanáda.

Sonia wraps her arms across her stomach, as if there were a huge stone there, or as if a huge stone had been dug out of her and she has to hold in the emptiness with her bare hands. It’s still only afternoon, and she can’t pretend away the eight endless hours till the children will be asleep for the night and she can climb into her bed as if it were a ship sailing away. From eternally damp bathing suits sagging on the line like flags of a conquered country; from the endless heaps of sand that get transferred from floor to dustpan to ground and then work their way back inside so there’s always grit under your shoes or eating away the enamel of the tub. If only you could do all the things that have to be done each day just once; if only you could marry your husband and have your children, and then climb on board a ship bound for nothing but the sea. There you’d stand, waving to the people gathered on the dock, waving once, twice, then making your way to the other side of the enormous ship, the side facing nothing but sky and water. Where the line between them dissolves, somehow, so that you’re not afraid of the water so far below you. Because there’s nothing, any more, to fear; everything’s turned to sky, the wind blowing past you, blowing right through you, as the ship moves off into
a blue that isn’t emptiness or nothingness, but everything you’ve ever longed for …

Suddenly, clearer than she’s ever known them, clearer even than in life, Sonia sees her father and her mother. Where the vegetable garden used to be, there’s the boat, or part of it; they are standing on the varnished deck, their arms wound tight round one another, staring in her direction, but not waving, not calling—not seeing her at all. Sonia can’t help herself; she throws out her arms and calls to them, heedless of who might walk by and hear her, “Take me with you, don’t leave me here alone—oh, take me with you!”

Her words sail into the air like the planes her children make from folds of scrap paper. The bees hum and the fly that had crawled over her neck and up to her lips rubs its thick body against the screen. Sonia rubs her knuckles into her eyes, the way a small child does to try to staunch its tears.

There’s a loose piece in the latticework covering the foundations of the Plotskys’ cabin. Katia pushes open the wobbly wood as if it were a door and crawls inside. It is beautifully cool and there are no insects here except for the fat, white grubs which, as Tania points out, don’t do any harm to them or to the cracked tools and broken furniture shoved here for temporary storage and long forgotten. It’s Tania’s favourite hiding place, though she’s careful not to use it too often. It’s the best place to be when she wants to eavesdrop on her mother’s company.

This afternoon it’s the ladies from what Tania’s heard her mother call the Lending Library, though it’s not as though they come to the Plotskys’ cottage every Friday afternoon to read books. They are up on the porch over Tania and Katia’s heads,
speaking English instead of the Ukrainian they always use when-the-kids-are-not-supposed-to-understand.

The ladies feel glamorous, slightly wicked speaking English together: for most of them it’s a second language and they feel not so much at home in it, as away. Away from their mothers and the examples set by those mothers: brave, hard-working women, all of them, but all too accepting of the sag of their skin and the folds ironed into their faces; of the flesh padding their hips and bellies, and the dumpy floral prints they wear, almost as uniforms. In the old country, a woman was old at forty: none of the tea drinkers at Kalyna Beach will confess to thirty-nine, except for prematurely grey-haired Annie Vesiuk, who’s more often to be seen in a swimsuit than anything like a housedress.

In a word, Sasha and the other members of the Lending Library are ladies—something their mothers would never care or want to be. Being a lady, however, is not inconsistent with gossiping, or listening to Sasha’s bawdy jokes, a fact for which the girls hidden beneath them are extremely thankful. Sometimes the talk is dull, nothing but casserole recipes, hem lengths, hairstyles. Last week, though, they’d got onto babies, having babies. “I was about to clean up the mess, scrape it into a bedpan and flush it away, when I saw there was something else there in all the blood, something alive. It was just a scrap, its heart hardly beating—hardly worth saving, we thought. But the doctor started working on it, and we managed to pull it through, though the damage,
Bozhe miy
!” This from Mrs. Vesiuk, who’d been a nurse before she got married. She had said right out loud, once, that Dr. Vesiuk had proposed to her on account of her big feet and wide hips: your pelvic floor, she’d said, and your shoe size are co-related, and as for big hips, everyone knows it makes having babies as easy as squeezing toothpaste from
a tube. And then Mrs. Stechyshyn had talked about her Caesarean, which Katia had always thought was a kind of salad dressing until Tania told her how they take a knife and slit your belly, whisking out the baby still in its plastic bag.

Tania’s brought her Barbies along, in case there’s nothing useful to be overheard today. The Barbies are dressed in strapless satin evening gowns, with marabou trim. On their permanently arched feet are high-heeled pumps, the heels thinner than toothpicks. The girls have no interest in dressing up the Barbies; instead they strip off the dolls’ clothes, making faces at the smooth, bare plastic, the lack of hair and nipples that they know, thanks to the magazines at the smoke shop near their Ukrainian School, belong to any woman Barbie’s age. Above them, the ladies are going on about mumps and scarlatina, so the girls decide to play Marie Antoinette, marching the Barbies to the guillotine (a pair of scissors lifted from Sonia’s sewing basket). Katia holds the scissors open; just as she sends the blades crashing down to the imagined cheers of an equally imagined multitude, Tania snaps off Barbie’s head. It’s a delicate manoeuvre for which perfect timing is essential; the girls have become marvels of precision. Sometimes the blonde Barbie is Marie Antoinette and the brunette merely watches; other times, it’s she who’s marched off to the guillotine, while blonde Barbie plays Madame Lafarge, kicking away the popped-off head with a diminutive foot still in a powder-blue mule.

Over their heads comes the noise of a door slamming, and the
chink
of ice in glasses: Sasha’s brought out the gin and tonic. Most of the ladies come not just to brace themselves for their husbands’ arrivals from the city, but also to catch a glimpse of Nadia Senchenko, about whom they’re fiercely curious as well as jealous. They want to be able to tell their friends who are sweating out the
summer in town how they have tea every Friday afternoon with the reclusive, the fastidious, the mysterious Nadia, wife of the only millionaire they are ever likely to know. Nadia, the Queen of the Rock of Gibraltar, as the kids have named the bluff on which the Senchenkos’ cottage stands, after the insurance company commercials on TV.

Tania pokes her friend’s shoulder: there’s been a drastic shift in the conversation: Katia’s aunt Zirka is speaking in her permanently shocked, girlish voice. “Is it any wonder, making
that
movie? Going off for a weekend together, leaving his wife and her husband behind.
Of course
they shared a bed, Annie
—of course
they spent their nights together, stark naked for all we know!”

“You think Liz Taylor wears baby dolls when she goes to bed with that stallion?” Halia Bozhyk laughs.

“You think they only go to bed together at night?” Sasha’s voice, cool as the ice cubes she’s splashing into the glasses.

“Darka does. Wears baby dolls, I mean.”

Katia’s ears prick—it’s her mother who’s said this, ignoring or diverting Sasha’s question.

“I told her it was the wrong thing for the cottage,” Sonia sighs, adjusting the dark glasses she wears to hide the redness of her eyes. “It gets cold at night. She said she didn’t have anything else to wear, but I know for a fact that Olya packed her some good flannelette nighties to bring up here.”

“Oh, Sunny, what does it matter what she sleeps in? Give the kid a break. As long as there’s no one dipsy-doodling in the sack with her, you don’t need to worry.”

The girls hear, or imagine, a little intake of breath, half guilty, half glad. Sasha says all the things no one else would dare to.

“But she lied to me, and God knows what she did with the
nighties her mother made her. Olya’s not made of money, you know. And what does it tell you—a girl who’d lie about a thing like that?”

“Give it a rest, Sunny. She’s not your daughter, and you’ve done your best. Sometimes you just have to let nature take its course. If Darka wants to wear baby dolls and freeze her buns off, let her. The worst she’ll come down with is a cold. Especially if we do our bit—keeping our husbands’ hands away from her, I mean.”

This time the silence is like fat forming over gravy. Sonia clears her throat, and Nadia Senchenko asks Sasha if she has any limes.

“Just ReaLemon, sweetheart. Down here we’re peasants, remember?”

Zirka Metelsky makes a clucking sound, which the other women ignore. They’d all be happier if Zirka didn’t belong to the Lending Library, but Sasha’s insisted she be let in. A sharp one, Sasha, with a tongue like a razor, and yet she has a weakness for underdogs and pariahs; she always finds a place at the table for even the worst behaved of guests. And yet Zirka, with her eyes the colour of boiled gooseberries, her plump little body and flappy lips, always makes a show of being scandalized by Sasha’s talk, the liberties she takes with Nadia Senchenko, who, as Zirka never ceases to remind the women, is her brother’s wife. Never, in Zirka’s conversation, do you hear “Jack and Nadia” or “Jack this, Jack that,” but always “My Brother Jack.”

The ladies are sitting in a semicircle of folding chairs across from Sasha’s chaise longue, safe, snug, the gin making a warm fizz inside their heads. Their children are asleep, locked up in their cottages; their husbands are still miles and miles away, dinner a cloud of smoke on the horizon. Even the whine of mosquitos in their ears, the slaps they administer to themselves or one another
with a
Got ‘im!
or
Almost got ‘im!
add to their relish in the one hour of their week that can be given the name of Leisure. There are six of them: Sonia, who’s come late; Zirka, wearing one of her husband’s shirts over her pedal-pushers, to keep the sun off her, though everyone knows it’s to hide the weight she’s put on over the winter. Annie, her hair cut short as a boy’s; Halia and Stefka, whom Sasha calls, right to their faces, the Siamese twins, because they think as well as talk and dress exactly alike, and are both married to men in the “medical business”—a pharmacist and a maker of dentures. Last of all, Nadia, her dark hair pulled into a chignon, and her black-rimmed glasses making her look like Nana Mouskouri, of whom even Zirka’s heard tell.