Jill moans and turns suddenly, her arm thrashing Margaret in the chest. How can I sleep through this, Margaret wonders, through this damned headache, the awful-smelling room? Jill curls against her, hands tucked between her knees, and sleeps a dreamless sleep. Margaret must lie flat on her back because if she tries to sleep on her side she smells the perspiration of another person in the pillow. Bill? she wonders, and her stomach twists. Jill murmurs in sleep. Moody
and silent by day, Jill only begrudgingly agreed to play with the younger children. But she wouldn’t go swimming; she had resisted Margaret’s pleas to put on her bathing suit. Margaret sighs when she thinks of this now, and attributes it to shyness over her developing breasts. Jill had been content to wade, as deep as her shorts would allow, through the sunlit water, beads of it spraying up around her body like multi-faceted crystals, diamonds, white fire.
Oh, Margaret thinks as she stares up at the ceiling through the throbbing of her headache, she’d been such an idiot to agree to come. “I think that’s a terrific idea,” Timothy had said when he returned her call. “There’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t go. Mel will manage perfectly fine on his own.”
And Mel is managing perfectly fine, too. At that moment in Carona, Mel is upstairs in his room about to have a go at the last position depicted in the cartoon. Garth lies naked on Jill’s bed across the hall, waiting his turn.
So, although a little drunk, Mel is managing fine. Do this, he says, and is delighted when Elsa flips up her skirt and turns her little white bum up to greet him. But then suddenly Elsa does something quite different. She stiffens and both legs shoot straight out. She’s as rigid as a board as she topples sideways from the chair onto the floor and lands on her back. Garth hears a thud, and then a steady thumping sound, and comes to investigate. Mel stands over Elsa, his eyes wide with shock. Her heels bump against the floor, up and down in a steady rhythm, like a wound-up toy soldier knocked onto its back, and her head thrashes back and forth in time to it. “Christ,” Garth says as foam begins to bubble at the corners of her mouth and her eyes roll up inside her head. He gathers up his clothing, dresses swiftly, and leaves a terrified Mel to manage alone.
Margaret and Timothy will be proud of Mel in the end, of how he had been man enough to go downstairs to the telephone, to pick it up and call Josh Miller.
Josh doesn’t talk much as he mounts the stairs to the bedroom. “Epilepsy, a seizure,” he says, and, “blanket.” He kneels beside Elsa and wipes her mouth with his handkerchief while Mel strips the blanket from his bed. Josh rolls Elsa into it and cradles her in his arms as though she were a baby, or a limp doll, Mel thinks, as Josh pushes past him and out of the room. Mel sees Elsa’s round white face, the flutter of her eyelashes closed in deep sleep, and the soft pout of her mouth; the corners turned down in a look of extreme disappointment. His heart constricts. She has consented to bare her breasts for him, and still he has refused to kiss her. He would like to now. He doesn’t understand this desire or the feeling of guilt that he interprets as pity or sorrow.
The car door slams shut and Josh drives away leaving Mel with an incredible regret: to not be able to erase the past few weeks and unlearn what he knows. He imagines that Elsa loved him and that he betrayed that love. He wanders about the empty house and stops to turn on the radio. He listens to Buddy Knox singing that all he wants is a party doll, which only increases his sense of remorse, and so he goes out to face the still and dark town.
He takes the back way, choosing the street that runs parallel to Main Street. He walks through the shadows cast by the United Church, past houses, then the Alliance Gospel Church. A soft light burns in the window of the Hardys’ cottage. Behind the curtain people kneel in a circle. They’re praying for a spiritual revival to occur in the town of Carona. They continue to pray for individuals who have been brought to their minds in dreams or while they were out weeding the garden, for those whose names they’ve heard in soft but distinct whispers across their shoulders. They continue to pray for Margaret and Timothy Barber.
Mel steps out from the alley beside Johnson’s Hardware and into the street. Garth is nowhere to be seen. Hiding under a bed, Mel thinks, and suddenly feels self-righteous as he looks up at the window above Josh’s shop. He wants to gaze up at that lit window and wallow in his regret, but a figure darts across the street towards him, and before Mel realizes that it’s the woman Adele, she leaps on him, striking his face with the palm of her hand, and then her fingers become claws raking the skin beneath his eyes. Mel ducks, backing away from her, arms raised to ward off the blows. He gasps as she punches him in the stomach. “You swine! You dirty little coward! You have to use little girls!” she shouts. Her fists pound against his shoulders. Mel wants to say, Wait a minute. Not once had Elsa indicated that she didn’t want to do it. She was the one who offered it to him in the first place. Mel doesn’t know that Elsa’s behaviour is, sadly, a learned one. Adele brings her knee up between Mel’s legs, going for his balls, and so he swings, blindly but hard, connecting with the woman’s head, and is astonished and sick suddenly to see her hair go flying away into the street. Adele crouches, glaring, her orange mouth contorted in anger, and her bald head, with a scar running in a crooked line from one side of it to the other, shines silver in the light of the street lamp. Mel has never seen such rage, or a bald-headed woman. Such ugliness. “Jesus!” he says, turns, and flees from it. As he runs, he hears the sound of the hardware store’s windows shattering, one and then the other.
Margaret hears a mewing sound coming from the adjoining room in the cabin. One of Bunny’s children, wanting to be led through the bushes to the back of the property and the privy. Well, she will ignore it tonight, in the same way Bunny and Bill seem able to ignore all their children’s requests during the night. A terrific idea, Timothy had said. Bill’s idea, Bunny had confessed. So far Bill had
only joined them for the evening meal, eating quickly and almost silently, speaking only to bring order to the children’s unruly behaviour or to ask Bunny to pass him something. Bunny’s basset-hound eyes appeared hurt and uneasy the whole time. Bill would already be gone in the morning when they gathered in the large room that served as both kitchen and living room to feed the brood, as Bunny put it. Feed the sharks, you mean, Margaret had thought as she worked at preparing sandwiches and filling jars with lemonade for their day beside the water. At night they all went to bed at the same time, Margaret with her two girls in the evil-smelling and cobweb-draped room, Bunny’s four children crammed into an equally small room, and Bill and Bunny out on the veranda on a fold-down couch. Then the cabin grew still and silent as everyone but Margaret, with her grinding headache, fell asleep. Absolutely useless, Margaret thinks. She gets up, dressing quickly, and goes out through the back door so she won’t have to pass by Bill and Bunny.
Whenever Bunny had spoken about the cabin she’d inherited at the lake, Margaret imagined something more than the little wooden unpainted box with its tilting veranda and the cluster of equally decrepit, festering cabins around it, dark and empty. She had imagined the sound of water breaking in waves against the shore just outside the door and the light of the moon dropping down against the lake, illuminating the room, and Bill standing there in the doorway, pausing in that light before moving towards her. Not his absence, not the almost fifteen-minute walk to reach the water.
The road is a dark corridor but at the end of it she sees light moving against the face of the lake. She steps out onto the beach, hears the soft wash of waves against the sand, and her headache begins to diminish. She walks by the children’s toppled sculptures, by shovels and pails strewn here and there. On she goes, beyond the dock and away from the main beach to a rising in the land and a sand bank that forms a gentle cove. She burrows down into the sand, its
warmth an embrace, the cool breeze off the water a caress against her hot skin. She tries not to think of Timothy asleep in his motel room somewhere in Saskatchewan and focuses instead on a white shape that appears to hover above the surface of the black water. A sail. A sailboat. She watches it for several moments and it doesn’t seem to move. A pelican? she wonders, and finds its silent white presence comforting. Margaret thinks of Timothy returning home and reaching for her beneath the blankets. And how she once confessed to Rita that she was frightened about turning thirty-five and facing the possibility of never having sex with a man other than Timothy. “Why on earth would you want to?” Rita asked and Margaret was surprised to see the blush rising beneath the heavy beige pancake make-up Rita wore. “Just to know what it would be like,” Margaret said. “Let me tell you then,” Rita stated rather strongly, “once you’ve had one, you’ve had them all.”
But Margaret doesn’t think so. Margaret knows there’s something she’s missing. She knows this from her strange and sometimes bizarre early-morning dreams of making love with strangers, or with Timothy, her children, Bunny, Bill. Margaret has even had several dreams of being made love to by a large black dog. Dreams of wet and slippery sex that bring excruciating pleasure and leave her aching for more. Then Margaret lies awake and listens to the sounds of the house to determine if the children are still asleep and will not hear the squeak of bedsprings as she replays the dream beneath her eyelids and seeks relief. Margaret has even dressed up and gone to see a doctor in the city and sat out in the waiting room with all the other patients, those whose broken parts – in their wrappings of bandages or plaster, in their fevers manifested by blotchy rashes – were more evident. And after the doctor had poked about her insides, Margaret had got dressed again and sat across from him on a Naugahyde chair and said, “What am I supposed to feel when I have intercourse?”
“There’s no indication of fibroids,” he said. “Are you experiencing discomfort?”
“No,” Margaret said, determined to be clear. “It’s just that I don’t feel anything.”
He laughed. “Well, what do you expect? That you’ll feel the earth moving? Hear bells?”
Yes, Margaret thought. Yes, yes, yes.
Margaret’s eyes remain fixed on the white triangular shape that hovers above the lake, only several yards away or perhaps a mile. It could be three feet tall or thirty, solid or the substance of the evening air, a reflection cast down from the other side of things, it’s difficult to tell. Fool, Margaret thinks, and winces against the image that leaps unbidden behind her eyes. She sees herself kneeling on the floor of the kitchen, looking down at Bill’s feet, at a contrast of colours, his brown socks set against the green-and-white tile floor, which she had polished earlier that day, before everything else, before the heat, before the children had come down from their beds, still warm, wanting cold cereal and milk and listening to her instructions on how to behave at the Lutheran Sunday School picnic. Before she had put on the new blouse she made. Two coats of paste wax polished to a high shine with woollen sweaters wrapped around her feet. The new liquid waxes don’t give as high a shine: her mother’s voice, speaking to her as she worked. “Your account at the store is too high, I can’t let you add to it for a floor polisher at this time,” Reginald had said, sounding like Mr. Block, a high-school teacher they had once played Hallowe’en pranks on. Bunny and herself and others she had forgotten who had left Carona. At night, first snowfall, hiding and waiting for the man to make his regular journey to the back of the yard and the privy, she remembered as she polished the kitchen floor and tried not to think that Bill North would be coming over later on in the day. The floor shone like a mirror all
around Margaret as she knelt in front of Bill, the tape measure, clammy against her neck, swinging back and forth. The cat was at her side, batting now and then at the tape as it moved.
Or, the floor shone like fresh ice, its surface having just been flooded with water and hardened. But already there were scuff marks on it. She could see them from the angle at which she knelt, the little hook-shaped marks her children’s shoes had made on its surface, and when Bill spread his feet apart, she saw the outline of his socked feet in perspiration on the shiny floor. Heat radiated off his leg as she held up the tape to take his inseam measurement. He had touched the back of her neck and her skin tingled.
“Margaret,” he’d said as he ran his fingers across her hot skin, and she heard in his voice what she believed to be amazement that he was finally, at last, able to touch her. “Margaret,” she whispers to herself as she leans back into the warm sand, saying her name the way she thinks he’d said it, examining its tone. I wonder whatever happened to Mr. Block? Bunny had asked recently, and she’d told Bunny what she’d heard, that their bachelor teacher had found happiness in the arms of a widow in another town. You have to let the first coat of wax harden thoroughly before you apply the second, she hears her mother instruct. “Margaret,” she repeats to herself, but she cannot put away or change or deny the sound of Bill’s zipper sliding open or the memory of the yeasty smell of him as he drew her head towards him. Oh my God, she’d thought. Oh God. The light finally dawning. What am I going to do? How can I get out of this gracefully? He doesn’t smell clean, she thought, as he thrust his hips towards her. She hadn’t been able to think of a single graceful thing to do and so she gave in to the pressure of his hand at her neck and became a reluctant child, eyes closed, mouth opening to receive him.
She had wondered how to do it. How to arrange her mouth, what to do with her tongue and teeth. She’d thought suddenly that Bunny’s small mouth was probably not large enough to hold him.
“Good,” Bill said. “Good, good,” he repeated with each thrust and Margaret wondered how not to gag. “Good,” he said as he came. His stream bubbled in the back of her mouth, filling it, and she wanted to pull away from it but he held her head in place. She waited for it to end, and at last he grew limp and slid from her mouth. There was more liquid than she’d expected and so she kept her mouth large inside, holding it, not wanting to swallow, and waited until he turned away to fix himself. She looked around quickly to see what she might do with it and saw the tray of pins resting on the freshly polished floor. She bent over it, opened her mouth, and the semen dropped in a gush down onto the pins. The cat crouched beside Margaret, watching, and then rose to his haunches, padded over to the small plastic tray, and sniffed at it.