More in Anger (10 page)

Eventually, Opal broke down and wrote to Pearl asking her please to make clear whether she wanted them to go to her house for Christmas or not. She explained as nicely as she could that they needed to do some planning, so they needed to know. To be on the safe side Mac had gone down to make the reservations on the train, in case Pearl answered in the affirmative. Even so, he could not get them the dates they wanted; he had to take a bedroom leaving on the Thursday before Christmas, which Opal was afraid Pearl would not like, because after the time they had stayed a week, Pearl never wanted to be bothered with them more than two days before Christmas and two days after. Pearl might think Thursday was too soon for them to arrive, and tell them they would be in her way.

While they waited for a response, Opal fretted. She tried to focus on making her annual list of ingredients for her Christmas baking, but she couldn't concentrate and kept misplacing the list and then having to start over. What if Pearl said no again? What then? What would her family in Winnipeg think if they weren't with their grandchildren for Christmas? Pearl and May had always been in Winnipeg with their grandparents for
Christmas. Watching as they opened their parcels. The uncertainty was breaking Opal's heart. Each day, she fretted until the mailman came, empty-handed. Here it was, almost December. They simply had to get an answer from her pretty soon. She wanted Mac to telephone, but he wouldn't. “That would be the wrong thing to do,” he said. “And you may have noticed that we are always doing the wrong thing as far as Pearl is concerned.”

“Pooh,” Opal had retorted.

On December 1, they received Pearl's letter. Pearl did not want them to come. So that was that. Opal felt let down, and she knew that Mac did too, though he would never admit it. They would be alone for Christmas, then, here in Calgary. Opal wailed that Pearl hadn't even given any reasons, any explanation at all. She hadn't sounded sad or sorry for one second.

“Why should that surprise you?” said Mac.

“But why doesn't she tell us what is the matter?”

“When has Pearl ever expressed any regard for our feelings? Being secretive is her modus operandi. You can never pry anything out of her unless she wants you to.”

Opal tried to talk Mac into going out to the coast anyway. They could stay at the Beresford Hotel and keep out from underfoot at Pearl's. Mac flatly refused. He said he could not see where that would get them except into more hot water. He said she should go out alone. But she didn't want to. “We should go together,” she said. Mac repeated that he would not butt in where he was not wanted. “Case closed,” he said.

Opal sat for hours every day on the green fibreglass chair outside Mac's hospital room, steadily knitting her way through ball after ball of coral-coloured mohair wool. In the bottom of her knitting bag she had Mac's book in case he should ask for it,
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
, which he had ordered as an early birthday present to himself. But she would not go into his room.

Once she finished this sleeve and sewed the pieces together and blocked the sweater and then sewed on the flat mother-of-pearl buttons, she would have knit each of her granddaughters a new cardigan. This coral one was for the youngest, Vivien. Opal concentrated on what she was doing, increase, decrease, though given the number of sweaters she had knit in her life, she could have almost done it blind.

Inside the hospital room, Mac, conscious and aware that he was likely dying from this, his second heart attack, lay unmoving, his hands at his sides on top of the covers. He did not read. He did not eat or drink. His glasses lay folded on the bedside table. He did not ask for Opal, or for Pearl or May. He did not ask for a thing. And then, one week before his eighty-second birthday, he died, with the door of his hospital room firmly shut between him and his wife, and that's the way their life together ended, with him on the inside and her on the outside, knitting.

Shortly after his death, Opal learned that Mac had made all legal arrangements long before. He had not said anything about them to her, he had not involved her in any of the decisions, and the instructions came as a terrible surprise. He had instructed his executor, a trust company, to undertake the selling of the
house and car as soon after his death as possible. It would be too much for a woman alone to handle, he noted, and he had wanted, according to the man from the trust company, to simplify matters for her.

Simplify? Simplify? How did robbing her of her home simplify anything? Opal saw his actions as deliberate cruelty, a final affirmation of what she had always suspected: that he did not love her, nor even like her, and this—this was his
coup de grâce
. This house was
hers
. She had wanted to live here for the rest of her life. How dare he? How could he? How she had revelled in doing all that she had been unable to do before, in that other house. She had decorated the house completely, she had grown all the flowers in its gardens. This house was
home
, and she loved it with all her heart.

But there was no time to adjust to anything. Now, with the world shifted greatly beneath her, and long before she was ready to face further change, Opal faced the For Sale sign in the middle of the lawn. Trust company. Who could trust them? At night she cried in fear and loneliness, and during the day, if the agent brought people by, she hid in the summer house or downstairs in the cold room. She could barely make a cup of tea without losing track of what she was doing, and when the house sold and the date of her eviction neared, she became frantic with worry yet was unable to string two thoughts together to help herself. Pain and anger sloshed weakly around inside her as she stood empty and alone in her bedroom looking out, her eyes fixed on her large, unkempt flower beds, remembering how they used to be, the glads tall and beautiful, packed with their
prizewinning blooms. This year she hadn't even got the bulbs in; here it was July and they were still wrapped in paper in the basement.

Opal sat in her new apartment's living room and looked out the window at the traffic on Seventeenth Avenue. Soon it would be Christmas, and she would be spending it alone for the first time. Last year at this time she was baking cookies and shopping for presents. Mac was at home. And now? Who would spend Christmas with her? Who would take her in? She couldn't go back to Winnipeg. Her sister Lillie had her hands full with her socialite's life and their poor loony brother Melville, and Lillie couldn't have, or wouldn't want, a gloomy widow hanging around. Her brothers Reggie, Farley, Jimmy—all of them were dead; her sister Pearly K was dead. Her daughter Pearl didn't want her, had never wanted her, and neither did May's husband. She would have to get through Christmas somehow.

In February, as a snowstorm raged outside, Opal put aside her pride and called Pearl. She could hear the vacuum going in the background. Pearl hated vacuuming. “I was wondering,” Opal said. “Do you think—” She hesitated. “Do you think I could try coming to live with you for a little while? I could help with the children.”

After a long pause, Pearl said, “You have a nice new apartment, Mother. Which I helped you find, you may remember. You can't just leave it.”

“It's a very nice apartment, Pearl, it really is, but I'm so terribly lonely these days. I don't see anyone. Pearl?” Opal's right hand fidgeted with a digestive cracker and a small pile of crumbs beside it.

Pearl heaved a martyr's heavy sigh into the phone, a sigh that said she could certainly live without such attempts at emotional manipulation. A sigh that also said how could you say no to such a request from your own mother? “On a trial basis then, Mother,” Pearl finally said. And Opal hung up the telephone both relieved and sad, and dabbed her tearful eyes with her handkerchief, one of the handkerchiefs she had stitched so many years ago for her trousseau.

Opal emerged from her bedroom at Pearl's and walked slowly along the hardwood hall towards the steps that led down into the living room, where Pearl had just finished watering her African violets. Opal could see Amy and Vivien, eight and seven, standing behind the glass door of the playroom, watching. Now Pearl was turning the plants in the indirect sunlight so that the lay of their leaves would be uniform. “Would you like a little drink?” Opal heard her ask the violets kindly. “It will help you grow. Is that better?” Amy and Vivien knocked on the glass and smiled and waved at their grandmother. Their mother looked up, first at them, then at her mother, and absorbed what she was seeing.

“Mother!” she said sharply. “Look what you're doing!”

Opal stopped, looked around her, looked at the floor, saw the puddle between her feet.

“I'm standing in some water,” she said with hesitation in her voice. “Someone's spilled a little water. I can get a cloth …”

Pearl stood up like an ogress and moved aggressively towards her mother. Opal shrank back. Amy and Vivien turned away. Poor Gramma. She had been there only a week and already she was driving their mother around the bend. “Oh for heaven's sake, Mother, it's
urine
,” Pearl said now. “I can't spend my days mopping up after you. You're not a
child
, Mother! Oh,
damn it all
anyway!” And her voice rose in its familiar martyr's wail.

“Oh my,” said Opal, embarrassed, backing away. “Oh my goodness.” As quickly as she could, she turned into her room and shut the door behind her.

At the nursing home Pearl found for her in White Rock, Opal stayed in bed. Sorrow and confusion were etched deeper and deeper in her face, while her knitting lay untouched on her bedside table. During one visit Pearl left the room to talk to the nurse, and Opal, trying to find something to say to the little girls, smiled wanly at Amy and Vivien and said, “Would you like to see my scar? From my operation?” The children exchanged glances. What operation? It was rude to say nothing. It would be rude to say no, even though something about this was not right. Confused, Vivien said, “Okay.” Opal laboured to hike her hospital gown up past her waist. The children saw her big soft white thighs, the funny thick white underwear. “Right here,” said Opal. Then Pearl walked in. “
Stop
that, Mother!” she ordered. She pushed Amy and Vivien aside and yanked up the bedding. “Pull down your nightdress! Hell's
bells
, Mother, what is
wrong
with you?!”