Vanishing and Other Stories (17 page)

“That's the purpose of parents,” says David. “To disapprove of what you do, so you can enjoy doing it.”

He tells her he's from Wales and moved to Canada three years ago.

“I'm over a foot taller than anyone in my family,” he says between bites of an omelette. “It was how I knew I didn't belong at home. I looked an imposter. Everyone in Swansea called me Dai Tall.”

He tells Penny that his mother hoped he'd become a preacher—a tall man commands authority, she'd said—but the Church wasn't for him. Now he's in real estate: he buys houses, fixes them up, resells them. He has property in Mount Royal and Sunnyside, and is thinking of getting into development. He can't be more than a couple of years older than Penny, but she guesses he'll soon be wealthier than anyone she knows in Montreal.

“I can't keep up with business,” he says. “The oil in Leduc helps.”

“You own houses and you live in that motel?”

“It's easier—I don't have to worry about furniture. I can pick up and go any time.”

His foreignness is obvious: he orders tea, not coffee, and is disappointed when the waitress doesn't scald the cup. But other than that, he's pure Alberta: capitalist, inventive, decisive. Next election, he tells her, he'll vote Social Credit.

Penny thinks of the earnest disapproval Andrew would show him. But David—he tells her to call him Dai—has a musical
quality to his voice, and she loves it. He reminds her of a song-and-dance man, an entertainer, someone who tells lies for a living. She feels the way she did as a child, mesmerized by her mother's French.

“She thinks I'm crazy. She keeps writing and telling me to come home,” he says of his own mother. “She lives in a tiny stone cottage in Llan. It doesn't have heat and the roof leaks.” He eats quickly, as though he's got somewhere to go. “I tell her that, out here, if there were houses that old”—he finishes his eggs and pushes his plate away—“we'd just tear them down.”

 

 

PENNY HADN
'
T KNOWN ABOUT
her second engagement. When she was fourteen, a boy joined her class in the middle of the year. He was from Boston, and had been sent to Canada to stay with an aunt after his mother died. He was a shy, absent boy who always seemed to be falling ill.

Katherine insisted on having him over for dinner. She prepared a roast chicken, one of the only times she managed much beyond sardines on toast. During the meal she pressed the boy to talk about Boston. He couldn't tell her much, but Katherine gushed over the details he gave about the weather and the street where he lived.

“It sounds divine,” she said. “Doesn't it sound divine, Paul?”

Penny's father didn't answer. He hunched over his plate and ate quickly, as though he'd been starving. His napkin was tucked into his shirt, his tie flipped over one shoulder.

“You don't need to eat so fast,” said Katherine. “We have a guest. A foreign guest.”

Paul looked at the boy and nodded, then returned to eating.

Penny and this boy said nothing to each other, which was about as much as they ever said at school. After dinner, to rescue him from Katherine's questions, Penny showed him her stamp collection. She had stamps from as far away as India and China.

“Wow,” he'd said.

A year later, long after he'd been shipped back to Boston—it was said his father had already remarried—Penny received a letter from him, calling off an engagement she'd never been aware of.

I was wrong
, he wrote,
I never loved you
.

There was a loneliness about the letter that stopped Penny from laughing. She didn't show it to anyone. She just peeled off the stamp and pasted it into her collection.

 

 

PENNY SPENDS THE FIRST WEEKEND
in her airless motel room, preparing her lessons. She takes breaks only to eat, sleep, and once, to write a letter to Donna.
I've arrived!
she begins, then continues with tales of mysterious, dark-haired men she met on the train, men who glanced at her “achingly.” The letter is witty and ironic, but in the end she doesn't send it. Perhaps it's childish. Perhaps Donna has outgrown that sort of thing, since she's to be married in less than a month. Her fiancé is well off, and she is considered the lucky one because she'll never have to travel across the country for a job.

When Penny arrives for her first class, she feels sweaty and short of breath. She picks up a piece of chalk to steady her hands
and writes her name on the board. This gives her confidence: her own name. She introduces herself, then goes through the class list. She'll never be able to tell her students apart: nearly all are women, and there are two Margarets, one Maggie, and four Jennys. Almost every one of them is blond. Also, the students' skin is different from hers—tanned. They are people who have grown up outside, and remind her of animals. Cute but unpredictable animals.

“Bonjour,”
she says, and waves a chalk-dusted hand.
“Ça va?”

They stare at her without interest or malice, as though she is not really there. She wears a green skirt and a blouse that matches. Her outfit is the same colour as the chalkboard, and it's possible she is camouflaged and the students can't see her at all.

She thinks of when Katherine taught her French—to speak, not with the accent of a Québécoise, but
comme une petite Parisienne
. As a child, Penny sat with her mother in the kitchen and they practised vocabulary with flash cards Katherine made by cutting pictures from magazines and catalogues. Her mother would hold up a picture of a chair and Penny would say,
“Une chaise.”

She quickly outgrew simple vocabulary drills, and Katherine quizzed her imagination too. She might hold up a clipping of a face, a woman who had recently been in the news, or maybe an actress, and Penny would say,
“Une femme. Son visage.”

“Yes. And what about her face?”

Penny studied the features.
“Elle est triste? Malheureuse?”

Katherine looked at the picture. “Yes. She might be sad. Or maybe she's angry.”

“En colère.”

“Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.”

Penny looks out at the faces of her students, faces she would describe as looking sleepy or sweetly bored. “By the end of the semester,” she says, “you'll have a good grasp of vocabulary and be able to speak in the present and past tenses.”

One of the Margarets raises her hand. “What about the future?”

“The future?” Penny is so grateful to this girl for listening that she could kiss her. “We'll try to get to that too. But the future is complicated.”

 

 

PENNY
'
S MOTHER LOVED TO WALK
through Montreal's wintry streets. She'd put on her coat and scarf, draw a thick line of lipstick over her mouth, and take the curlers from her dark hair. She had a small fur hat, a white puff of a thing she'd inherited from a wealthy, distant aunt. When she placed it on her head, she always said the same thing: “A woman must make an effort, even if she's just going out to buy eggs.” She adjusted the hat and admired its angle in the mirror. “It's a tyranny, but also a truth.”

From the time she was twelve, Penny accompanied her mother on these walks. Sometimes they stopped at Morgan's so Katherine could admire a mink coat in the window. Sometimes they bought a quart of milk on the way home. Katherine wore heels and had to take her daughter's arm to steady herself on the frosty pavement. Her shoes clicked over the ice, and Penny associated this sound with adventure. She heard its rhythm along the rails while she travelled to Calgary.

They moved east, crossing the unmarked border of St-Laurent. The city became noticeably poorer—the houses closer together, the snow unshovelled. Montreal was a place of categories, a city mapped by difference and prejudice. Most of the adults Penny's parents knew—and by extension their children, whom Penny grew up with—didn't speak a word of French and rarely went to the other side of the city.

But Katherine's time in France had made her brave. She felt she was at home anywhere in Montreal, in the same way she had walked through the many
arrondissements
in Paris. She had the same disdain for French Canadians as any other Protestant Anglo. But there was a part of her that worshipped and envied them—her idea of them—for their ties to Europe. They were nothing like her stifled, British-bred husband.

Penny and Katherine often got lost in these foreign parts of the city, and had to find their way back by negotiating streetcars and strange, curving streets. After an hour, Katherine's pace would slow and her knee would weaken. She leaned more of her weight on her daughter, and Penny steadied and held her. Katherine's face flushed from the effort, and Penny never saw her look so beautiful.

“This is how I met your father,” Katherine said. “I asked him for directions.”

Penny knew this story: her mother was home from dancing in Paris due to a ripped tendon in her knee, and she spent her days wandering through the city. Her knee was swollen and the doctor recommended a cane, but Katherine ignored advice. She wore heels and walked every day. She was determined. She was putting on a show.

“Your father insisted on driving me back to my house. He thought it was too far for a woman to walk.”

And with this, her life was given sudden direction: marriage, motherhood. They honeymooned at Niagara Falls, which Katherine called the perfect place for a suicide.

“What did you imagine it would be like?” Penny asked. “When you got married?”

“Imagine? I didn't imagine anything.” Katherine raised a dark, sculpted eyebrow. “When it comes to marriage, imagining is the worst mistake a woman can make.”

 

 

NEAR THE MOTEL
there is only one grocery store, which stocks bruised apples and cheese that grows mouldy in an open cooler. There are pawnshops and a used-book store that sells the kinds of paperbacks Katherine never allowed in the house. When Penny hears a knock on her motel door, she opens it cautiously, the chain still bolted.