“And Adam?” It's all a deliberate, transparent effort to make her think of her family in Poland, and it works. She has a sister-in-law now, and a nephew. In a twist of fate it was Marie who had met them, and Anna has not. When Marie visited Anna's parents in 1983 Adam was just a toddler with a crooked smile and small plump hands. When Marie was leaving, he gave her a wet kiss. She has had a soft spot for him ever since.
“Adam sent me a card,” Anna says. He is but a face she has traced on photographs, recognising the toys and clothes she and William have bought for him.
“I'm going to Prague next week. Why don't you come with me? You could go to Poland, too. See your parents?” Marie says.
“All I ever got were false signs,” Anna says, as if she hasn't heard. She is thinking of the times her heart stopped when she looked at the kitchen clock, its black hand moving too fast, advancing into spaces she found increasingly difficult to explain. “He is late,” she thought, trying to calm down, “a bit later than usual. He was stopped by a student. He had nowhere to call from.” She would pace to the window and back, all the time waiting for the sound of William's car in the driveway, for the cheerful squeak of the storm doors, the sound of a key turning in the lock. When he did come in, ashamed of her
fears, she would run to him, throw her arms around his neck, and press her cheek to his chest. “What's that all about?” he would say, laughing. “Another bout of your Slavic soul?”
“Anna,” Marie says softly. “You can't blame yourself for not knowing. You shouldn't think of it like that.”
“Like what?” Anna asks.
“Like you could have somehow stopped it,” Marie says. Her black hair has a slight purple hue to it. It's very becoming, but Anna will not say so. It annoys her that she would even notice a thing like that.
“I've been punished,” Anna says. “For coming here. For leaving Piotr. For leaving Poland.”
“That's absolute bullshit and you know it,” Marie says, frowning. “So don't even start it.” She is fixing her eyes on Anna now, her grey almond shaped eyes, clouded with anger and impatience. They have been through this before. Anna knows Marie doesn't like these self-accusations, but she brings them out nevertheless, with blind persistence, like a tongue pushing on a loosened tooth. She longs to hear Marie's protests. “For Goodness sake, Anna! People change, they grow! You had the right to think of yourself, of your own needs! Can't you see that?”
Anna tries to nod, but she breaks into tears, instead. Warm, abundant, like a spring shower.
It was no business of hers to write to Marilyn, but she has always been rash, always trying to mend what wasn't hers to mend in the first place. “I'm sure,” she had written, “that in the face of death a lot can be forgiven.”
Marilyn wrote “No” across Anna's letter and returned it. Anna still has it in her purse when she is sitting in Julia's living room in N.D.G. This is a new place, just rented. Anna is sitting in a wicker armchair and she is watching her stepdaughter make tea. At the funeral service she was glad to have Julia next to her, to see her swaying gently back and forth, crumpling a white handkerchief in her hand. Through the mesh of Anna's veil, Julia's face seemed darkened, turned into a shadow, but at that time Anna was grateful for the black muslin draped over
her own hat, hiding her swollen eyes, dampening the brightness of colours, protecting her grief.
The peace between them is a fragile one. Seven years before, when her stepdaughter stormed out of their Westmount home, Julia was thin and nervous, her long hair tied into a golden ponytail. She always bumped into things, then, bruised her thighs on table corners, cut her fingers when she was slicing bread. Now, at twenty-seven, Anna's stepdaughter moves with confidence, her gestures slow and deliberate. Her hair is cropped short, making her look slightly boyish, in spite of her full lips and her tight dress.
“Still with honey instead of sugar?” Julia asks her. She is placing a pot of herbal tea on a low coffee table with rattan legs. She holds it firmly by the handle.
Anna doesn't really like Julia's new place. It is too noisy, even on a Sunday, and too dark. The furniture is simple. A futon by the coffee table, a pine bookcase, and an armchair. On one of the walls Julia has put the same framed poster she had in her old apartment, the
Expose Yourself to Art
one William had given her, a man opening his coat to a sculpture of a naked woman.
“Yes, please,” Anna says to the offer of honey. She has been leaning to the side far too long, and now her right leg has gone to sleep. She lifts herself up and limps toward the window. Julia's windows look right out on Sherbrooke Street.
“I wish I made myself call him,” Julia says. Her bottom lip trembles. She chews on it to stop the trembling. “I wish we had one good talk before he died.”
For the last few years William didn't even want to speak about Julia. He frowned and shrugged his shoulders, defeated. “I've tried,” he said. “You are my witness. We've both tried.”
In 1981, when Anna met her, Julia was seventeen. There was a smell of talcum powder around her, then, and something else, something familiar and, at the same time, out of place. “Vanilla,” Anna realised a split second later, “a scent of vanilla.”
They were all rather nervous that evening. When Julia sat down she took a white paper napkin into her hand and began
tearing it into small pieces and then, with her index finger and a thumb she rolled the pieces into little balls, and dropped them on the carpet.
“I hate school,” she announced when William asked her how she was doing. She was tall, pale, and very thin. Her lower lip was thrust forward, as if she were sulking, but this, too, could have been a calculated effect, for it gave her the aura of a pretty, spoilt child.
“Wow,” she said when Anna brought in an assortment of cheeses, prosciuto with melon, and smoked salmon spread. “How did you know I loved this stuff,” she asked.
Anna had hoped to become friends with Julia, then, had images of the two of them meeting for ice cream and coffee, or shopping for clothes. She wanted to smooth some of the lingering harshness in the way Julia spoke to her, some uneasiness, jealousy perhaps.
That evening Julia talked all the time, as if afraid to let them have a word, to contradict her. What did she talk about? Anna still remembers Julia's admiration for some girl who really had class. The friend she so much admired, Marcia, was
lethal.
“ You should have seen her, Dad. Swinging her purse. Guys just lose their heads.”
Marcia thought it cool to pinch things from stores, a lipstick, a comb, a packet of chewing gum. “There is this older guy, a sick jerk,” Julia went on without a pause. “His fat lips quiver when he sees her. Waiting for her after school in his Jag. 'Just to see you, my angel!' Julia's voice rose at the end of each sentence, as if they were all questions, and waited for William to disagree.
“Marcia said he begged her to sit in the car. She sat there and pissed on the seat.”
When she laughed, Julia tossed her head backwards and her shoulders shook. She bombarded them with words, unable to stop the staccato of exclamations and forced, jeering laughter. It was a performance, Anna thought, a rehearsal. She came to hear herself speak and to check her own power, to see William's eyes following her.
Julia, it seemed to Anna then, paid no attention to her. It was William she wanted, William with this smile on his face
that betrayed him. He was so happy to see his daughter again that he would accept everything she told him, pay any price. Agree with everything she said.
“I wish you could speak to Ma!” Julia said, finally. So that's why she came, Anna thought, to get him to fight her battles. She excused herself and went to the kitchen. From the living room Julia's voice was a long murmur of which Anna could make only a few words. “You are in my house and you are under eighteen. I'm not going to let you ruin your life ⦠Tell him to get out of here or I'll call the police ⦠She has no right! Hell, I'm not going to tell
her
everything.”
In the kitchen, Anna felt her body become heavier, harder to move. It was getting dark, time to switch on the lights. “Now,” she urged herself on and arranged a few more slices of poppyseed cake on a platter. When the murmurs in the living room became less intense, she walked in. Julia took a big piece of cake from the plate and winced.
“I'm eating like a pig. God, you must think I'm pregnant or something,” Julia laughed, addressing Anna for the first time. William laughed, too. It was a guilty laugh, begging for acceptance.
“Oh, no,” Anna said, quickly, and then thought that it was probably a stupid thing to say.
They never knew when Julia would come, when a few angry words from Marilyn would make her pack her bag and arrive on their doorstep. It became a way of life, a sea-saw in which they were only one of the sides â once up, once down. And there was always Käthe with her terse calls to William. “But Willi, she is only a child.”
Anna let words slip, betray her resentment. She was not good at sharing William, at changing plans at the last minute because of Julia's arrival. It became harder and harder to pick up damp clothes from the bathroom floor, to remove Julia's long golden hairs from her hairbrush.
“Why do you let her speak to you like that?” she made a mistake of asking William after a long series of “Oh, shut up Dad,” and “Lay off, will you!”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked in return.
“Tell her she can't live like that. Tell her
you
don't like it.”
He gave her a hurt look, then, as if she disappointed him, turned into someone else, someone he could no longer trust. “Then she won't come here, at all,” he said. “Is
that
what you want?”
When Julia turned twenty she moved in with them, taking psychology and music at McGill. William beamed with pride. Anna could hear them, from behind the closed doors of Julia's room, laughing, recalling stories from the past. Some cat with a striped tail making off with Julia's doll. The bitter lettuce leaves from their garden in the country. She couldn't shake off the feeling that they were talking about her, laughing at her behind her back.
Her own questions Julia answered with quick
yes
or
no
, flashing Anna a smile with her braced teeth, their conversations ending before they could begin. Anna thought herself only good enough for picking up the trail of crumbled tissue, dirty dishes on the floor, on the sofa, socks rolled into sweaty balls that had to be turned inside out and soaked before washing.
If only she and William could have a child, she thought, it would be all different. She wouldn't mind it so much. But no matter how much they wanted it, she couldn't get pregnant. Her doctor urged her not to despair. There was no medical reason why she couldn't conceive, he said. It may be just a matter of time. She was not the only one, either. It happened so often in his practice.
The trip to Italy was to be an escape, a rest from the tensions of the last months. Two weeks alone with William, long walks though the streets of Florence, Tuscan meals at trattorias, his voice whispering in her ear how well-dressed people seemed there, how open about their bodies. “Look at the ease and grace with which they move,” he kept telling her, his eyes following the young women who passed them by. They went to see
David
at the Academia, and then sat looking at Michelangelo's
Bacchus
in the Bargello, at the rounded belly and the lecherous half smile of the marble god, suspicious of
the boundaries of virtue. When they sat there, a blind man in dark glasses walked in. He was holding a thin white cane, and a young boy who held his arm described to him, in a soft, humming voice, what sculptures they were passing by. When they reached
Bacchus
, the blind man leaned forward and slowly ran his fingers along the marble skin.
Something wasn't right. She knew that as soon as the taxi brought them from the airport. Julia was standing behind the screen doors waiting for them, her hair gathered into a tight pony tail, her pale face covered with red blotches. “I'm sorry, Dad,” she said, biting her lips. “Could I talk to you ⦠alone?”
“Go ahead,” Anna said. “I'll wait.” She paid the driver, an elderly Sikh in a freshly ironed blue shirt, and asked him to leave the suitcases in the driveway. “The children, Ma'am,” he said with sympathy. “With them, there is always trouble. But without them, there is no life.” Anna nodded and waved to him as the taxi backed and left.
The lawn, she noticed at once, was a mess. Cigarette butts were scattered among drying, trampled grass, and broken beer bottles glittered in the sun. Someone had dug out deep square holes in the middle of the lawn. A splash of silver by the window turned out to be one of the junipers, sprayed with paint, its branches imprisoned in a shining amour.
Anna waited outside for a few more minutes, registering more broken flowers, spots where grass was painted red, blue, and yellow. Someone had pushed a tire into the flowerbed. She was growing anxious. “William!” she called. Nobody answered. “William! Julia! May I come in?”
She stood in the hall listening, but heard nothing. In the living room Julia was standing by the fireplace, leaning over the mantel. William was sitting on the sofa, his face hidden in his hands.
“No, I have nothing to admit,” Julia was saying when she Anna came in. “And I don't have to take this shit, especially not from you!”
The sour smell of vomit, cigarette smoke and spilled beer filled the air. The walls and ceiling were covered with drying red flesh of tomatoes, yellowish seeds still clinging to the pulp.
More broken glass; among the shards were fragments of William's crystal wine decanter. Anna stepped on something soft that squiggled under her foot. Bending down, she saw it was a used condom.