More in Anger (26 page)

“Bill Garbageman?! Why would Bill Garbageman have come into the house?”

“Don't ask me.”

“But how would he even know your ring was there?”

“How would
I
know?
I
wouldn't presume to know how a garbageman's mind works.”

Pearl began bundling the jewellery back up, replacing it somewhat roughly in the bags and boxes, as though every piece, compounded by the presence of this daughter, caused her a struggle.

When she closed the doors of her dressing table, she turned to Viv and said, “Now you can tell me about my fine son-in-law. How is Chas? Why didn't he come with you?”

By the second year of their marriage, Pearl had reverted to her old self and was treating Roger, and her daughters, like absolute shit. The mooning and fawning had all been crap. Of course. They had all been duped, and poor Roger was stuck with her. “Yes, dear,” he said, chipper in his humility, in his inability to do anything right. “I'm sorry, dear.” What a crock it all had been. She was a bitch, she had always been a bitch, she had just tricked them for a while.

And then the bad news came: Roger had lung cancer. He was going to die. He couldn't stop coughing; he spat into a basin; the sounds of his retching drove Pearl wild. But in the end it wasn't the cancer that killed him. One day, after disembarking the HandyDART bus and dismissing the driver, Pearl and Roger had made their way arm in arm across the cement patio to the steps. The three steps, up to their back door, that Roger had wanted to put railings on but Pearl had refused. “
No
,” she had said. “How many times do I have to tell you? I am
not
going to fall. Stop pestering me.” That afternoon they fell off the steps and landed on the concrete.

“He has so little to say now,” Pearl complained once her cracked pelvis had healed and she was released from the hospital. “It is impossible to have a decent conversation. I sit there. He lies there. He doesn't say a word anymore, and so I can't tell if he can even hear me. And every time it's twenty dollars by taxi!”

“But how is he?” Viv asked. “How is his fractured skull? How is the cancer?”

“How is he? Don't ask me. No one bothers to call and let me know. Why don't you ask me how
I
am doing? I could answer that, if anyone cared.”

“Maybe they think
you
don't care.”

“Did you tell them that?”

“No. Have you called the hospital?”

“Why should I?”

After Roger's funeral, Viv drove Pearl back to her house, and before the others arrived she said, “Maybe now you'll get a goddam railing, Mum. It could happen again, you know.”

“That's a heartless thing to say. But coming from you I shouldn't be surprised.
No
. I've faced enough change for now.”

“Mum, I think—”

“No one cares what you think. I least of all.”

“Mum—”

“Shut your trap and mind your own business. Help me into the house.”

“
Don't
get a goddam railing, Mum.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

Evelyn stood in the foyer of The Manor welcoming her guests, her tall black beehive glistening, her long black skirt beautifully pressed, a replica cameo pinned high in the centre of the collar of her lace-trimmed white blouse. “Good evening, Pearl,” she said. “So nice to see you.”

“Good evening,” said Pearl. Evelyn smiled benevolently and took Pearl's coat, and then Viv's. Evelyn's husband, Marcel, emerged from the kitchen wearing his chef's hat. He kissed Pearl's hand. Pearl beamed.
They
certainly knew how to please her. Pearl and Viv followed Evelyn's gliding figure past the other customers to what had been Pearl and Roger's favourite booth, the last one, at the back of the restaurant, near the big mirrors.

“My daughter may need a menu, but I don't,” said Pearl. “I am very hungry. I will have the creamed seafood
en cassoulet
.”

“A very good choice,” said Evelyn.

“I so like the scallops,” Pearl beamed again.

Once Evelyn was gone, she turned to Vivien and the light went out of her face as she said sharply, “I have something to say to you and you are not to interrupt.”

“All right.”

“It concerns my husband's will.”

Viv's heart lurched. She felt capable of murder when she thought about Roger's will. She had promised Chas, promised herself that she would keep her mouth shut no matter what. Poor old Roger. Now, in addition to his shortened life, his will had been declared invalid because of some technical detail and so Pearl could legally keep
everything
, no matter what Roger had said he wanted for his sons. The sons had asked if they might have some of Roger's clothes—a hand-tooled leather belt he had liked; a tie one of them had given him on his seventy-fifth birthday. They asked if they could have his special egg cup, and a photo album from when they were children. A plaster dog that
had sat on their fireplace hearth. “No, you may not,” Pearl said. “Not a thing.” She threw out the photo album. She sent the clothes to the church thrift sale by taxi. The jewellery, some of it valuable and all of it intended for Roger's sons' wives, was in her jewellery boxes. She talked to the Mexican plaster dog and stroked it on the head and put a dish of water down beside it. “Don't tell me I don't have a sense of humour,” she said.

Now at dinner she said, “
I
believe I have acted, and am acting, fairly,” and she took a confident sip of her cocktail, a Planter's Punch. “First of all, I am aware that you think I have acted badly about the jewellery. But you do not know Roger's sons or their wives. I have never seen either Charlena or Janice in anything other than blue jeans. Ever. They
cannot
appreciate jewellery.”

“That doesn't matter,” Viv said angrily, breaking her vow and hating herself. “You know what he wanted. He wrote it all down.”

“The lawyers have told me I don't
have
to do anything, and no one can make me. Least of all you.”

“You wouldn't even give them his
egg cup
, for Christ's sake. Or his
belt
.”

Pearl took a confident sip and said, “Well, listen to you on your high horse. You're a fine one to be telling me what is right and wrong. Who do you think you are?”

“Nobody. Is that the right answer?”

“It is. I am not about to listen to the likes of you. You may as well be quiet. Think what you like.”

“I
will
think what I like,” Viv hissed, choking now with fury. “I think you are
wicked
. I
hate
it that you are my mother.”

Viv slid out of the booth and headed for the washroom. She sat on the toilet with her head in her hands. “Just leave,” she whispered. “Just fucking leave. Get out of here. Go.”

But she didn't. She was trying to be different. She was trying not to get involved, not to get embroiled, ensnared. She was trying to stand back and observe, she was trying to rise above, or transcend. She washed her face and dried it on the rough brown paper towels and returned to the booth, taking long, deep breaths. Her mother said in a meek, little-old-lady voice, “You were gone a long time.”

Vivien's jaw moved, but she didn't speak. She crunched the ice cubes from her empty glass like bones.

“It is my turn now,” Pearl said, laying down her fork and placing her neatly folded serviette beside it. Her plate was almost full. Vivien's was empty. She couldn't have said what she had ordered or eaten. Vacuumed, was more like it. She wasn't doing so well on her pledges to be unaffected, was she? So much for progress. Pearl slid out of the booth, stepped carefully down onto the carpet and slowly made her way along the aisle towards the washroom. Vivien closed her eyes. How stressed are you? she asked herself. The only time the desire to drink got this bad was when she was around her mother. She ordered another Perrier. She kept her eyes closed and took more deep breaths.

“Vivien! Vivien!” There was urgency in her mother's voice. Viv opened her eyes and looked over. Pearl was standing in the middle of the restaurant in her white slip. Her red and gold skirt was around her ankles, and she was trapped: she couldn't move forward or backward because the skirt was in the way, and she
wasn't flexible enough to reach down to pull it up. Her eyes met her daughter's. She looked down at herself. Their eyes met again.

Then Vivien started to laugh. She laughed so hard she couldn't breathe. She attempted to leave the booth, but she broke up again, laughed, and laughed, and laughed until finally, finally she could move.
“Mum!”
she whispered as she came up to her, gasping for air, guts aching. “Your skirt fell off!”

Pearl snickered then too. “
I know that!
Do you think I don't
know
that?! Help me!”

They were both laughing then, both bent over, fooling with the silky red and gold outfit. Vivien managed to pull the skirt up and get it rebuttoned, but she was gasping and dizzy from embarrassment and lack of oxygen. Pearl, however, had regained her composure, and she shook her daughter off and raised her head high, pointedly ignored everyone in the restaurant as she continued her trip to the ladies' room. Still giggling, Vivien returned to the booth, her guts tight and clenched, her face red. She picked up her water glass and held it against her cheek. The coldness felt good. She couldn't stop laughing. Then the bathroom door opened and Pearl emerged.

Vivien watched her mother's slow progress as she began her return trip, and she felt gales both of laughter and of tears welling up in her again. She stifled them both, and in that moment she had to admit that in spite of it all, she sometimes admired her mother. She had to admire how Pearl could totally ignore what people thought and keep going. Keep doing what to her was
right
. Even when it meant taking on the world.

Goldie, over eight, greying in the muzzle, stiff in the hips and cloudy in the eyes, stood beside her on the bluff. Viv closed her eyes and felt the brisk wind blowing. She was facing east, towards Saskatchewan. The dog was close against her leg. It would be so hard to leave him behind. Chas too, though he'd never believe it if she told him. He'd never believe that she still loved him, either. He'd say she had a funny way of showing it.