Waiting for Time (2 page)

I was born in a different place—in the Maritimes, I think. But my mother and I have lived on Dugan Street in Ottawa for as long as I can remember. I don't have any brothers or sisters. Audrey has lots of brothers but no sisters, so we pretend we are sisters. Audrey says brothers are not much good. Her brothers are big and rowdy. Mrs. Petrassi calls them hooligans, she makes them stay outdoors most of the time. Mrs. Petrassi takes care of me when my mother is at work. On nice days she sends Audrey and me outdoors too. She says we must learn to amuse ourselves.

But on rainy days, if we promise not to touch anything, Mrs. Petrassi lets Audrey and me play house in my mother's room. My mother's room is called a bed-sitter because it has a big chair by the window. Audrey's Aunt Celie used to have our room but now she works in Eaton's downtown. The bed-sitter is sunny and looks out on the street. It is the nicest room in the Petrassi house. At night my mother and I sleep there together.

I want very much to ask my mother if we will have to leave the bed-sitter when she gets married. But it is best not to ask. Grown-ups never tell you anything they think you want to know—at least my mother doesn't. If I stay still she sometimes tells me things accidentally. I press my hands together, clamp them between my knees, I stop swinging my feet and wait.

“The child's father was a sea captain—from the Maritimes,” I once heard her tell Mrs. Petrassi.

I hate the way my mother says “the child”—as if I belong to someone else. I do not know where the Maritimes are, but like the way they sound—marratimes, merrytimes, marrytimes—maybe my mother is marrying in the Maritimes. Will I see the sea captain who is my father? Will we go to live with him in the Maritimes? Will she let Audrey come to visit during the holidays?

My mother is intent on fastening a clasp beneath the collar of her good dress. She is not going to say anything. “Are you going to marry my father?” the question pops out.

“Your father died in the war—you know that, Scrap!” My mother turns away from the mirror, lifts me down from the high, old-fashioned bed and sets me on my feet. “Come on now, we have to go to Milady's.”

Had I known that my father died in the war? Perhaps. I cannot remember feeling sorrow, or even surprise—just disappointed that we are only going next door to Milady's.

Milady's is a tiny dress shop squat between the Petrassi house and Saul Rosenberg's book and stationery store where my mother works. Audrey and I call the woman who owns the dress shop Milady—which we think is her name. Milady is grand, tall, with pale, pale skin, purple lips and purple fingernails. She wears dark velvet turbans pinned at the side with huge, glittering pins. Audrey's mother has told us that a great tragedy in Milady's life caused all her hair to fall out.

“She's bald as an egg!” was what Mrs. Petrassi said. Because of this, Audrey and I never pass the dress shop without stopping to rest our chins on the window ledge and stare in. We hope one day to catch Milady without her turban, to see her gleaming egg-like head.

“It's your big day, Charlotte,” Milady says when we come into the store. She smiles her juicy purple smile and takes a round box from beneath the counter. She reaches into the box with both hands, as if lifting a baby from a carriage. When her hands come up they are holding a hat.

“Dusty rose—just the shade to go with that dress,” Milady passes my mother the hat and holds up a hand mirror for her to look into.

Tilting her head this way and that my mother smiles at her reflection. Her dark hair curls against the rose coloured brim and the brim reflects a pink glow onto her face. She is very pretty.

“Do you have anything suitable for Scrap?” she asks. Then, seeing my scowl, she corrects herself, “Lav—she wants to be called Lav,” she tells Milady.

Something hot and unpleasant stabs at me—resentment mixed with guilt and bewilderment. I do not want to be called Lav. “My name is Lavinia—Lavinia Andrews. Scrap is a baby name—I'm old enough to be called Lavinia now,” I say.

“Don't put on airs,” my mother stares at me, just as she had on my first day at school when she told the teacher to call me Lav. Now she's pretending I want to be called this stupid name.

Neither woman notices my anger. Milady holds out an organdy thing that looks like a large, droopy, sunflower.

“It's beautiful,” my mother says, “like something Scarlett O'Hara would wear.” She sets the wide-brimmed hat on my head, tying the yellow ribbons in a stiff, scratchy bow under my chin.

I do not know Scarlett O'Hara. I fold my arms across my chest, “I'm not going to wear it,” I say.

The women look down at me. Then they exchange foolish smiles. “Well—maybe she's right—it doesn't suit her, somehow,” my mother is not really disappointed. She unties the ribbon, gives a small shrug and passes the hat back.

“No doubt she'll grow into a handsome woman,” Milady says.

But my mother has forgotten me, she nods in an absentminded way and asks to see some white gloves.

When we go out onto the street there is a man in a dark suit locking the bookshop door, although it is only three o'clock and Saul always locks up himself. Then the man slips the key into his pocket, he turns towards us and I see that it is Saul. Saul with his hair flattened down and his beard trimmed straight across instead of wisping into the woolly grey sweater he usually wears.

Saul is smiling. He takes my hand, and without a word we walk down the sidewalk and around the corner to Mulgrove Road United Church. I am glad it is Saul who is going to marry my mother, not some dark, unknown sea-captain, even if he is my father. I reach up and slip my other hand into my mother's gloved hand and we walk along, all three of us holding hands.

That memory is more than thirty years old and probably no longer accurate. Lav has observed that memories take on a life of their own, pick up detail, evolve into stories with beginnings, middles and ends—sometimes even with morals. It crosses her mind that some dark, unacknowledged fear has caused this particular memory to suface today. She rejects the idea, pushes it firmly away, decides remembering that happy hand-linked family walking in sunshine to a wedding is an omen that today's business will end well.

Lav moves a little faster through the sea of people on the wide sidewalk. She feels confident, exhilerated, thinks how pleasant it is to walk in a modern city—especially on a day such as this—one filled with sunshine, with racing white clouds that are reflected a thousand times in the glass facades of buildings—so that the earth spins and the city spins and you are at its centre, heels clicking on pavement, skirt swishing, hair moving like silk against your neck.

Never mind those woolly winter jackets, those fur hats and cumbersome overboots already lurking in store windows. Today is sufficient, today the streets throb with energy, with secrets that vibrate up from the warm centre of the earth.

There is a poem, something about crowds upon the pavement like fields of harvest wheat. Lav tries to recall other lines but cannot. How accommodating, how well dressed and happy they all look, this great, golden wheat field of people moving with cheerful good-humour in search of food and drink served quickly enough to get them back to their desks by one-thirty.

Lav marvels at the inventiveness of the human mind—to have conceived of such varied things as air-conditioned coffee shops, carts piled with orange chrysanthemums, poetry and flex-soled high heel shoes and glass towers that reflect the sky. She recalls how her stepfather used to tell her about invisible energy that would one day fuse thoughts to paper, atoms whose vibration through length and mass would slow time, or speed it up, whichever you wished. According to Saul such things have existed eternally. From the foundations of the world, he told her, there have been secrets hidden inside the earth, just waiting to be discovered.

This view of science as the luring of secrets from earth, air and water was probably what led her to become a scientist. Religion had failed, Saul used to say, law and politics and philosophy had failed, even his beloved poetry had failed.

“But,” and her stepfather would bend forward, holding out some book he wanted her to read, “Science will succeed, science will give us a world that is healthier, happier—a safe, productive world.”

And perhaps Saul had been right, Lav thinks, as she hurries through the humming October city towards her mother's apartment.

Charlotte had moved downtown after Saul died. Without anguish or discussion she had sold the book store on Dugan Street and rented an apartment fifteen minutes away from the Department of Fisheries building where Lav works. At the time Lav wondered if this was an offer of friendship, an indication that she and her mother might see more of one another. But apparently not. There has been no casual visiting, they never drop in on each other, never shop together as Lav has seen other mothers and daughters do.

Now that Lav and Philip own a house in the Glebe they occasionally ask her mother to dinner. But Charlotte never asks them back. Charlotte does not entertain. Her mother has, in fact, never made such a statement—though it is true. In all the years of her childhood Lav can not remember one visitor ever sitting at their table. Indeed she, Saul and her mother rarely sat there themselves.

Still, three or four times a year her mother cheerfully accepts invitations to dinner. Lav is surprised, really, at how well Philip and Charlotte get along, they are alike in some ways. Philip once remarked that Charlotte has a rational mind—a rare thing in a woman, he said.

Lav had shrugged. She has long ago grown tired of trying to decode her mother's mind, stopped trying to uncover her secrets, ceased to be intrigued by her silence. These days Lav lives happily in the present, she is indifferent to the past.

Today she is going to her mother for straightforward data. A security check of Department of Fisheries employees is being made. All she needs is her father's name, his birth and death dates and the names of her grandparents.

“I suppose I can have a look,” her mother had said when she telephoned this morning. Charlotte had seemed preoccupied, had said she is moving to California. Her mother can still surprise.

Lav does not enjoy travel, feels apprehensive boarding trains, planes, even busses. Last spring, partly in memory of Saul, she had gone on a guided tour to Israel and Egypt, had become ill and cut the trip short. She has never considered living anywhere but Ottawa. “Why?” she asked her mother, “Why move? And why to California?”

“I've always hated the cold—I might as well move south permanently,” Charlotte told her, so casually that she might have been talking about changing banks or the brand of tea she drinks. She suggested Lav come over at lunch time, before she begins packing.

When Lav arrives her mother is already searching through the big desk that once belonged to Saul. “What you need is in here somewhere,” she says.

Charlotte's apartment is on the tenth floor and has a view of the river. Lav has been here only twice. She is still surprised that her mother has chosen to live in such a place, grander, more stylish than anything she would have expected.

Saul's desk seems to be the only thing Charlotte has rescued from the dark rooms behind the bookstore. Her apartment is furnished in black and white: heavy glass tables, white carpet, black steel dining room chairs and a black leather sofa set. Although Charlotte has lived here for almost four years, the place has the clean, uncluttered look of a hotel suite. The only colour in the apartment is a painting, one huge, blazing-red poppy hanging above the black sofa.

“I only had one letter from your father—no papers. I suppose some might have come after I left,” her mother peers into the desk's pigeon-holes which seem to be empty.

“Left where?” Lav asks. It is an absent-minded question, she is gazing about, trying to reconcile how the woman who has chosen this decor could have been content surrounded by Saul's old books, his clutter of discarded furniture. She is wondering if her mother will offer her lunch, she sniffs, nothing is cooking but then Charlotte always hated to cook, there might be tea and toast, sliced fruit perhaps.

“Cape Random—you know that! I told you a dozen times I ran away from a place called Cape Random!” Lav turns and catches her mother regarding her with what seems to be dislike, dislike quickly concealed as Charlotte bends and, still talking, opens one of the desk drawers.

“That's if a woman with a three-month-old baby can be said to run. I never got in touch with his people again. I don't even know when his birthday was. Make up a date—what difference? He was between nineteen and twenty-one the year you were born.”

The phone rings. Lav gathers from the conversation that Charlotte is selling all this sharp-edged furniture. “Practically new, hardly used,” she is saying, “everything modern, top of the line at the Bay.”

Lav stands in the middle of the room, her mother has not asked her to sit. I have never, never heard of Cape Random, she thinks. She culls through memory, through imagination, through a clutter of truths, half-truths and layers of lies—trying to sort one from the other. What had she been told? What imagined? What imagined being told? She reminds herself that she is a scientist, trained to observe, to test hypotheses, to identify truth—but in her own past there is no truth—nothing is labelled, nothing sure.