More in Anger (16 page)

“Ha,” said Pearl.

“What, if I may ask,” said Tom, “do you consider
your
duty if it isn't your home and family?”

“For the record,” she said as he stopped talking and attempted to move past her, “I have not been alone
all day
. For too much of the day, in fact, I've been surrounded by little wretches who want something from me
all the time
. I'd be happy to trade you any day. They're your children too, remember, or have you forgotten?”

Tom looked over her shoulder at his piano. “Excuse me,” he said to Pearl.

Pearl's voice changed. “Oh, Tom,” she beseeched, clutching his arm. “Please wait, just for a minute? Couldn't you please,
please
for
one second
appreciate how hard it is for me? Don't you
ever
attempt to see things from where I stand?”

Tom yanked his arm away from her. “You are standing in the way,” he said, and walked around her and sat down on the piano bench. He placed his hands lightly on his thighs. He bent his head.

“No,” she said. “No, you don't, damn you anyway.” Her voice rose in anger as she stood on the top step and looked down at him. “The extent to which you don't care is abundantly clear. Just look at you at that damned piano.” Tom lifted his hands to the keyboard and began playing. Major scales. Minor scales. Quickly, and loud. Next, the Bartók. Or the new one, the one by Dave Brubeck.

If she had time in the evenings after the supper dishes were done—and as the children grew, she was able to find half an hour or an hour more often—Pearl knit sweaters for herself. She did not knit as well as her sister, she knew, but she enjoyed it when she was too tired to read, and she counted it as something she did for herself. Too, the results of knitting were tangible, satisfying, and unlike domestic work, knitting stayed done for more than ten minutes and even garnered occasional praise. These days she could find more time to read, too, and as well as de Beauvoir and Sartre she was reading Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Beckett.

She tried to resume contact with her university girlfriends who, like her, were raising young families, but neither she nor they really had time to correspond beyond notes on Christmas
cards. Pearl had more than once made what she considered valiant efforts and written them each three- or four-page letters. But her attempts seldom gleaned a reply even from Marion, never from Esther, and she felt shunned. Who cared if she lived or died? Anything was more important than she was. She was abandoned. Unloved. Pain easily turned into anger, which coursed hotly through her body. To outward appearances she looked cold, and hard, and aloofly self-contained, but inwardly she seethed. The anger followed familiar paths.

No one cared an iota except perhaps little Amethyst, now in school and who, if she were coaxed, would kiss her mother even after she'd been thrashed, though it was hard to tell anymore if she was motivated more by greed than by genuine affection for her mother. But at least she would do as she was told. And Amethyst was the only one who didn't argue or cast her injured, baleful looks. She said, “Yes, Mummy. Okay Mum,” and her bed was always made and her homework was always done, though she seldom laughed, and always looked somewhat worried. She, one out of four, was fine, except for excessive snuffling from the allergies, and she earned the rewards that came her way, her clothes and her cookies and ice cream, though Pearl continued to have some concerns over the excessive eating. As a toddler, Amy had gone off to visit the neighbours and there she had begged for food. Begging food! Pearl had spanked her thoroughly and then pinned a note to the back of her shirt where she couldn't reach it:
Do Not Feed Me
. In what was surely a show of spite, Amy had now taken to eating her hands—chewing her nails down to the quick—and sneaking food from the refrigerator.
And so it was no wonder Amethyst was plump, while Vivien, who seemed barely to eat, was so thin.

The snow was turning to sleet by the time Tom came home one day in mid-December; his car made fresh tracks in the driveway. His supper was waiting for him on the kitchen table, cold and congealing. Pearl opened the front door to confront him, but when he saw her there, he turned around and headed back to his car.

“Where are you going now?” she said.

“I don't need this,” said Tom, and he closed his car door, backed into the turnaround and drove off in the sleet, making a second set of tracks over and beside the first, weaving in and out, combining and separating.

“What kind of Christmas is this going to be?” she called after him. “Tom? Tom!”

After the car's tail lights disappeared, Pearl slammed the front door. She stormed into Ruby's bedroom and shut the door behind her. Ruby, nineteen, looked up in fear from her book. “About Christmas,” Pearl said. “I'm telling your grandparents not to come after all. It isn't convenient. They can go somewhere else.” Ruby looked at her. “You know, I've about had it with the whole shiftless lot of you. You are out of your minds if you think I am going to play Santa on top of everything else. See how you all like
that
.”

Ruby asked her mother in a whisper who
was
going to be Santa then. Pearl said that she didn't know and she didn't care. “Ask your father,” she said. “
He
has all the answers.”

But Tom wasn't around the next day or the next. He was busy at Christmas, Ruby knew. All the doctors were. There were so many car accidents, there were so many drunks driving and getting into fights.

Ruby was worried about trying to be Santa all by herself, but she worried about asking Laurel to help her because Laurel, at thirteen, might still believe in Santa. And even if Laurel didn't still believe in Santa, Ruby worried that it would upset her to hear how their mother was refusing to do it. But above all she was worried that she couldn't do it right herself. So she told Laurel anyway, and on Christmas Eve, when Tom was out on a call and Amy and Vivien were in bed and who knew where their mother was, they filled the stockings and wrapped the presents from Santa that Pearl had bought before she got angry and quit and which were stored in big shopping bags in her closet. Ruby felt guilty the whole time, as though she and Laurel were doing something they weren't supposed to do. Laurel cried and cried and Ruby said couldn't she please, please stop. But Laurel was a little sister herself, and couldn't.

Pearl was well aware that Tom was an attractive man. She knew too that some of his traits—the ambiguity, the never quite saying no, or yes—were appealing to a certain kind of woman. The kind who didn't care if he ever took any initiative or made up his mind. He could seem, she knew, to be charming and intelligent while actually being vague and indecisive. Some women could attribute desirable traits to him in light of his quiet good looks
and warm, unreadable smile. Some women seemed able to detect a gentle vulnerability in Tom Mayfield that Pearl identified as spinelessness, and to forgive him everything, while she forgave him nothing.

His four daughters worshipped him—which was easy to do when he was as remote as a god on Olympus—while she, she was therefore unfairly cast as a harridan from Hades. Vivien was the worst. When Pearl sent her outdoors to play before supper, out the kitchen window Pearl could see her wandering up and down the driveway, and if the window were open she could hear her making up her ridiculous cowboy songs as she waited for her precious father to arrive home. The songs were as ingenuous as her view of him; she naively imagined him as a hero out in the world healing and saving people. Well, let her have a man like Tom when she married. Let that be her curse.
That
would cure her romanticism.

There was the business between Tom and that ridiculous woman at the corner store. Etta Carson. She and her husband ran the IGA; Etta was the cashier and Roy was the stock boy and butcher. They didn't have children, and they lived upstairs at the back of the store. The Carsons were friends with Irma, the cleaning lady, and her husband, a house painter named Joe. This arrangement was handy and useful to Etta, Pearl reported to May, because Etta was always so eager for news about Dr. Mayfield. It was Etta, she said, who began leaving unsigned cards and letters for Tom in the mailbox, and when Pearl was the one who went down for the morning mail and found the notes, she read them and then took pleasure in making great fun of Etta by reading selections aloud at the dinner table. “Oh my,” she might
say. “This one reeks of what must be Evening in Paris. Afternoon in Beresford would be more like it, though, wouldn't it? Smelling faintly of mushroom compost? Is it having the desired effect on you, Tom? Are you going to have to nip out to the store for cigarettes?”

The three girls watched with uneasy interest as their mother provoked their father. Laurel kicked the rungs of her chair. “Sit still,” said Pearl. Laurel slipped down in her chair until her eyes were at table level. “You sit up this instant,” said Pearl. Amethyst was next. Even if Amethyst
appeared
to be still and quiet, beneath the table Pearl knew she was tapping the ends of her shoes together, and her fingers were fidgeting and twitching. She likely had an extra dinner bun in her lap, too, the little thief, saving it for later. So Pearl glowered at her and predictably she started to snuffle. Pearl heaved a sigh. And Vivien? She was staring angrily at her plate as though she were trying to break it with her gaze. No doubt wishing Pearl would leave her wonderful father alone. How little she knew. Even the old dog Jake, who lay otherwise motionless in front of the fireplace, ever hopeful that someday there would be another fire in the grate to warm his old black and white body, had one ear cocked for the sound of danger. It floated in the air, made his nostrils and eyelids flicker.

Pearl touched her lips with her serviette. “I have something further on the subject to share that may be of interest,” she said. “The
pièce de résistance
. If I may have your full attention.” And she took the letter from its envelope. “You simply must listen to this. It is priceless. This time she's written, ‘My heart beats at the thought of you.' Only she has spelled it b-e-e-t-s. Beets! That
woman has such colourful prose. And she has included a pressed flower from her garden. Isn't that sweet.”

Tom muttered something about “unkind.”

“Unkind.” Pearl laughed bitterly. “Well, you ought to know about that. I will pass this missive around now, so that you all can see. Laurel, you can clear the table. Laurel! Do as you're told!”

After a long, tense silence filled with the clatter of plates on the kitchen counter and a crash on the floor as Laurel dropped a glass, Tom said, “Did you hear what Pearson had to say today?”

Pearl stared at him, nonplussed. Then she said, as though she had been waiting for the opportunity, “I have no sense of the world beyond the laundry room door.”

One Sunday night in June, the telephone rang and it was Roy Carson calling from the IGA to say that he'd found Jake, dead, hit by a car, in the ditch across from their store. Mr. Carson had seen him when he was sweeping the lot after closing up for the night.

Tom located a large empty sack in the garden shed and rounded up Laurel, Amethyst and Vivien, and together they walked to the corner.

As the four of them turned back up the driveway carrying Jake's body, Tom carrying two corners and Laurel two and the little girls traipsing behind, Pearl watched them from the kitchen window. Then she came out the back door and down the steps into the carport just as Tom and Laurel were laying the dog down on the cement slab. Amethyst and Vivien stood beside their silent father, tears streaming down their small, miserable faces, watching, watching. Laurel continued to sob quietly as she
patted Jake goodbye and then turned away, leaned against one of the wooden posts. “Poor old boy,” Pearl said sadly, her voice oddly gentle as she crouched down and stroked the dog.
“Jake's fate I mourn; poor Jake is now no more, / Ye Muses mourn, ye chamber-maids deplore.”
She added softly, “My poor old fellow,” and stood up, while Vivien pushed up closer against Amy, wiping her snot and her tears on her sister's shoulder.