More in Anger (6 page)

Opal's youngest brother, Jimmy, had started out in the family hardware store but decided that he didn't much want to be bossed around by older brothers for the rest of his life. So he found himself a job as a tobacco salesman, which didn't please his parents much but did please his older brother Melville, who smoked like a chimney his whole life long. “I know what
I
want for Christmas, Jimmy!” he'd say with his huge and goofy laugh. “Some more of those tailor-made smokes you sell!” Jimmy turned out to be a good salesman. At first his sales territory was limited to northern Manitoba, but within two years he was transferred to Calgary, and said goodbye to his parents, and Melville, and his other siblings. As good luck would have it, Opal and Mac had recently moved up into Mount Royal and hadn't sold their first house yet, so Jimmy and his family rented it. Mac's only stipulation was that Jimmy wasn't to smoke in the house. “If I have to go outside for a drink, Opal, then he can step outside to smoke,” he said. But of course Jimmy didn't.

Mabel Maude, Jimmy's wife, was Opal's favourite sister-in-law; Opal had always found her
utterly
charming. Effervescent, even, and so endlessly kind. Jimmy called her M&M, after those candies in the cardboard tubes that had just come out.
Everyone
liked her. Especially Melville—he and Jimmy had come close to blows over her more than once because of Melville's ridiculous attempts at flirting. When they were still dating, and even after they were married, Melville would put his arm around M&M, or tickle her until she giggled, or whisper in her ear, or lift her right up onto his shoulder, she was so little and he was so big. Melville knew that his moves drove Jimmy wild, and he always watched to see what kind of reaction he was getting. So then
Jimmy would stop supplying Melville with cigarettes, and Melville would get mad and pout and try to trip Jimmy every time he walked by his chair.

Opal knew that Jimmy had smoked now and again since he was in his teens and sneaked the odd one out of Melville's pack, but working for the tobacco company, it wasn't long before Jimmy was a heavier smoker than Melville—which was really saying something—and taking full advantage of the free cigarettes from the company. When Jimmy would go home to Winnipeg to visit head office or the family, Georgie told Opal, he and Melville would sit out on the porch together to smoke because she, Georgie, wouldn't have it in her house, and they were out there most of the day and into the night, immersed in the thick haze of smoke.

In Calgary, Jimmy's coughing had started to become a nuisance; his regular smoker's cough had gradually grown in both frequency and depth. He began to make such a hair-raising and unpleasant racket each morning as he spat out the phlegm and guck that poor horrified Mabel Maude ran the water in the kitchen sink until one of the children pulled at her skirt to tell her that he was finished. To the three little boys, the sounds their father made in the mornings would become ones they remembered as familiar, almost homey, and comforting in their ritual quality, and in the incremental repetition. The cough eventually grew so deep and so rich that it interfered with his breathing, and then his talking; he noticed it most, he told Opal, when he gave his selling spiel. He was still in his thirties when the verdict came down: cancer of the lung in both lungs. Still, he did not stop smoking, and everything in the house reeked of it, from the
curtains to the towels to the children's socks and underwear. Too late now, he said ruefully, and put another cigarette between his lips and flicked open his years-of-service lighter.

With Pearl away at McGill and May in high school, Opal had time to help Mabel Maude with Jimmy as he grew sicker, and since the houses were less than a mile apart, it was convenient too, an easy walk down the hill from Mount Royal into Elbow Park, though returning home up the hill was another matter.

Each time she entered the house, Opal remembered that day in 1915 when Mac had carried her across this very threshold and put her down in this very foyer. She remembered in both her body and her mind how what had met her eyes had baffled and hurt her and caused their first serious fight. She had wondered since if they had ever really got over that fight: in some ways it seemed to have marred their entire life together. She shook her head at the recollection. If becoming a married woman weren't strange enough in and of itself—filled with the struggle to form a new identity first as wife and then as wife and mother, her own family left behind in Winnipeg—she had struggled also, struggled hard, and alone, and unappreciated, with living in an environment defined almost completely by a stranger's belongings. It hadn't been until they moved up the hill that her trousseau was completely unpacked. More than twenty-five years after the wedding, she finally felt she was
home
.

The living arrangements in the house were different now. Upstairs, the bedroom where Opal's two daughters had been born was now Jimmy's sickroom. Mabel Maude slept in what had been the maid's room. The three boys shared the master bedroom, their three single beds like lozenges in a row and
inhabited by the eldest, Michael, and youngest, Jack (who wanted to be nearest the door), with Wilson in the middle.

Spring ended and with the start of summer Pearl returned home from McGill. A month later May graduated from high school. Opal attempted to engage both her daughters in helping their uncle and his family, not together, of course, since Pearl still despised her sister. May helped willingly, but Pearl, with her nose crammed in one book or another all the day long, obviously considered herself above all that pedestrian stuff like family, and she did not, she said plainly, like sickness. She did not, she said, like children. They were utterly annoying. “You might occasionally think beyond yourself,” said Opal, a comment which fell, like most of her comments to Pearl, on deaf ears. In fact, all her words met with a stony silence that commented, it seemed to Opal, more on Opal's stupidity for asking than on Pearl's hardness of heart.

So sometimes with May but more often alone, Opal faced the slog back up the hill at the end of a long day of helping out. As she left Jimmy's house, turned right and began the climb, Opal reminded herself that she needed the exercise. Like her own mother, she tended towards plumpness, and her fondness for pies and ice cream didn't help. Strawberry ice cream. Blackberry pies. Vanilla ice cream. May had inherited her mother's build, so she would have to watch out too when she got older, but the golf she played with her father had so far kept plumpness in check. Pearl was luckier: she would not have such a problem to struggle with. Pearl was compact, smaller-boned, sturdy, like her father. And hard. Headed. Hearted. Faced. Her struggles would be of a different order.

Funny, Opal thought as she trudged, how one child will inherit one aspect of a parent, another child another, and sometimes the combinations are complementary, sometimes not. The two girls were as light and dark in mood as they were fair and dark in hair and complexion. May was so easy to get along with. She did what she was told, and she came readily to her mother for affection. Pearl stood to one side and glared balefully, as though she had been refused affection before she had even sought it, which she seldom did.

As Opal felt her own heart pumping and her own lungs working harder and harder to provide her with the oxygen she needed to climb the last part of the hill, she thought of her brother Jimmy's lungs and how they couldn't hold enough air anymore, and how he'd never be able to make it up this hill, or any hill, ever again, and when she felt these waves of fear and despair, she felt tears welling in her eyes and wished again that Mac had come to get her in the car, especially on such a hot day. He was home from work by now. Didn't he know it was hard for her? Didn't he care? Opal stopped. Why did she bother asking? Mac didn't care about much, except perhaps Mac. And the way he got angry with himself for not landing a fish or for missing a golf shot suggested he didn't hold himself in the highest regard either. Pearl was her father's daughter, no doubt about that.

After she'd caught her breath, Opal stepped forward once again. She was perspiring; the day had been warm. By the time she came in the gate and front door of her own house, she was physically and emotionally exhausted, and she collapsed in a chair in the foyer. Mac would be upstairs, in his study, with the window opened wide and the electric fan going. When the
maid—the new one, the one with the cyclone hair—came out of the kitchen, Opal asked for a glass of lemonade. She carried her cold drink out to the summer house, her favourite place, and sat down on the bench, and pushed the stray hairs off her hot, moist face, and sighed as she mopped her forehead and cheeks, and viewed the colourful gladioluses in her garden, all the while thinking about her little brother Jimmy, and Mabel Maude, and the three little boys. How wrong it was that he, the youngest of all the King children, was dying. She would remember him best and most as the dear little baby she had helped her mother with. That's how she saw him, that's how she would always see him, not as the grey and wasting man who lay dying in bed, wheezing and trying to cough.

Opal needed to talk about her brother's suffering. She needed to talk about his endless and terrible coughing, about the great gobs of black guck that he spat into the basin. She had broached the topic with Mac many times, until he had told her to shut her trap on that particular topic and keep it that way. So sensitive himself, she thought. But not when it came to the feelings of others. He had heard enough, he said peevishly. He had little sympathy for her brother: tobacco was a disgusting habit and anyone who took such poisonous stuff deserved what he caught from it. Mac hadn't seen his brother-in-law in over six months; he hadn't set foot in the house since Christmas, when he wouldn't shut his own trap about how much the house reeked of tobacco smoke. As if that mattered anyhow. The best he would do now was wait in the car out on the street if it was raining and lay on the horn to hurry her up when he was the one who was late.

So the only ones left to tell were her daughters, who
had
to stay in the same room with her if she insisted. Pearl sat hard and tense, staring at a spot on the floor while her mother spoke. May, soft and worried, held her hands clasped in her lap and nodded her head sympathetically. May was such good company; what was the matter with Pearl? Opal had never seen anyone so critical. From the word go, no one could do a blessed thing right in her eyes, and Opal wished to goodness she'd get over it, but she doubted she would.

The air of superiority with which Pearl had departed for McGill had returned with her in spades. Whenever Pearl was in the same room with her mother, everything in Pearl's body looked as though it wanted to leave, as though she couldn't get away from her mother fast enough.
Everything
Opal said was met with a look of contempt,
every
answer had been dipped in condescension. If looks could wither, Opal would be, she thought, a small pile of dried sage or raspberry leaves under a pestle. If they could kill, she would long be in the ground and forgotten. Compost for her flowers. And in the face of her daughter's intolerance during these lopsided conversations, and in some perverse if futile attempt to
make
her daughter stay long enough to love her, Opal became stubborn, as if keeping her daughter there long enough would change her mind, would make her
want
to spend time with her mother. But still Pearl's body leaned and pulled towards the doorway, which Pearl herself seemed not to notice, but Opal did, and went on talking even more, as if stopping would give Pearl the opportunity she longed for, but in her nervousness she would bungle the words and
sound as stupid as Pearl believed her to be. If she stopped, Pearl would escape, and Opal would be alone with the terrible images of her brother dying, coupled with the knowledge that her own daughter so clearly disliked and maybe even hated her.

It was all bad in those days.

Staring at her spot on the floor, Pearl said nothing, but she undoubtedly heard every word, seethed inside, silently screamed at her mother to shut the
h
-
e
-double-
l
up, until eventually, finally, Opal wound down, and started to cry. Escape was at hand.

“May I go now, Mother?”

“You are heartless,” Opal accused her, hating the whine in her voice. “You haven't been down to see your uncle since you got back. You haven't even called him on the telephone. And I thought you liked your aunt Mabel Maude. If not your little cousins.”

“Your descriptions are so vivid, Mother, that I don't need to see them.”

“They would like to see you.”

“I detest smoking.”

“I think you should go for a visit.”

“Let May take my regards.”

“Heartless,” Opal said again.

Pearl looked at her coldly. Gave a huge, exasperated sigh. “I'll go with Dad. When
he
goes.”

“Pearl—”

“Mother? I have art history to read. I ought to be through the Renaissance by now.”

“Then go, you wretch!” Opal cried out angrily, gesturing with her hands to brush her daughter towards the door. “Go on. Get
out of my sight. Don't make me look at you. Don't let me keep you from the blessed Renaissance.”

Art history. English literature. As if Opal, because she had not gone to university, was therefore feeble-minded. As if her not going were a result of her own stupidity, not that of others. Well, it had not been her choice, she would have said if her daughter had cared to know. This daughter of hers knew nothing of her mother's struggles, her mother's thwarted desires, and likely wouldn't care anyway. Pearl had been handed her education on a silver platter, just as Lillie had been handed hers. After considerable work by Opal, the both of them. But at least Pearl took her education seriously. Too seriously, perhaps.