Vanishing and Other Stories Page 9

  “Where’s Revolution Now! guy?” I said.

  “What?” Karen tugged at the sleeves of the blazer. “This is a bit big on you.”

  She was wearing a layered skirt, a tank top, and a fake red flower in her hair. She must have stepped off the ferry like that—looking like the hottest, most badass flamenco dancer in the world. Lawrence must have forgotten all about me. Karen looked so great that even I wanted to make out with her. She looked so great that I wanted to cry.

  “I know.” I looked down at myself—my narrow hips, bony knees, all the evidence that I was still the old me. “Nothing fits right.”

  Then I did cry. I dropped both grocery bags, not caring if I broke the eggs or bruised the apples, and Karen said, “Oh, no—your mascara.”

  Lawrence obviously hadn’t told her anything, and that’s why she put her arms around me. She held me, pressed her cold Slurpee cup against my back, and I cried into her improbably red hair.

  “It’s okay,” said Karen. “It’s okay, Lise.”

  And the way she said that made me think that maybe Lawrence had told her. Maybe he’d told her everything. And maybe she wasn’t upset about it. She saw it as something that could be fixed or painted over. It’s okay. She’d said it with confidence—confidence in herself, in her ability to make everyone in the room feel happy and lucky, her ability to bring beauty to life.

  “I’m back now,” she said.

  Then Lawrence came up and put his arms around us both, and it was just like before. Except better, because Karen held me the way Lawrence never had. And I stopped crying so ostentatiously, so passionately. Instead, my tears came out in that small, silent way. I could hear Percy, or maybe it was Beau, batting one of the fallen cans of cat food around on the floor. And when Karen said, “Everything’s going to be okay,” I thought maybe she was right.

  t h e f i a n c é e

  WHEN PENNY STUMBLES OFF THE TRAIN, she has the drunk look of someone who’s spent too long absorbed in a book. For three days she travelled from Montreal to Calgary, reading Madame Bovary. Not that she’ll be allowed to teach nineteenth-century books, or any books at all, since Calgary’s university is too small to offer those kinds of courses. She has come to teach grammar and pronunciation to students who don’t speak a word of French.

  She carries a green, hard-sided suitcase, the same one her mother took to Paris. She insisted on minimalism before she left, partly to impress Andrew with her socialist packing skills.

  He stood in her bedroom and watched her fold cardigans into the suitcase. “Why do you have to go?”

  “It’s only for a year.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, Penny. West of Kenora, the world ends.”

  “The world doesn’t end.” She nudged his leg with her foot, tried to catch him on the spot that tickled. “It just gets flatter.”

  Penny feels as lost as her mother must have felt during her first days in Paris. She watches the train pull away; it will continue to Vancouver, a place she never before bothered to imagine. A sign tells her she’s on Ninth Avenue, in front of the Palliser Hotel. The few passengers who got off with her have been picked up by relatives or friends and are driving away along the grid of downtown roads. Under the bright sun, the cars have a dreamy quality as they cross the tracks and swerve into the quiet heart of the city. There’s a thinness to the air here, a dry heat that makes Penny’s skin itch and will probably give her nosebleeds. She smells dust, or maybe pollen. She sneezes twice, and no one takes any notice.

  THE FIRST TIME Penny was engaged, she and her fiancé were ten years old. His name was Adam—appropriate, she now thinks, considering the purity of their romance.

  Their engagement lasted an afternoon, when they folded wedding invitations out of paper torn from their spellers. Penny’s best friend, Donna, performed the ceremony behind the school. It was winter in Montreal, and snow soaked through the leather of their shoes. The bride and groom exchanged mittens instead of rings.

  But the next day, Penny went to hold Adam’s hand and he skipped away from her.

  “I’ve enlisted,” he said. This was during the last year of the Second World War, and the schoolyard games centred on imagined battles and deaths. “You’ll never see me again.”

  Penny ran home, burst through the door, and threw herself against her mother’s legs. Katherine was reading on the couch, the unfolded laundry in a pile beside her. She bent the corner of her page down. “What are you crying for?”

  When Penny explained, her mother said, “Is that all?” Then Katherine lifted Penny into her thin, ballet-trained arms. “Hush, now.” She held her daughter, stroked her hair, and Penny smelled cigarettes and lilac soap on her skin. “You’ll meet plenty of Adams. The choosing will be the hard part.”

  PENNY STAYS AT THE EXPEDITION MOTOR HOTEL, and her room is directly above the motel’s sign. It advertises Great Monthly Rates! under a picture of a camel with lewd-looking humps. In the distance are snow-capped mountains and the river she can barely glimpse from her window. All around her is dust and desert heat that rises from the pavement.

  The motel’s other guests are young men from places with incredible names like Carstairs and Medicine Hat. Some are in town on business, some for rodeo, and none can comprehend that she is a woman travelling on her own.

  “So you came here by yourself?” they ask over and over. “Where’re you from again?” They strain like they can’t quite hear her, or as though she speaks with a difficult accent.

  Only one of them says, “Montreal. I’ve been there. Nice place.” He is as young as the others, tall, and with the broad, innocent face of someone raised in the country. He wears a suit, carries a briefcase, and looks like a boy wearing his father’s clothing. They stand in the hotel lobby and he leans against a wall covered with photos of men on horses, the brims of their hats throwing shadow over their eyes.

  “You know Montreal?” Penny craves a memory of home, hers or someone else’s. “When were you there? For how long?”

  “A few days.” He has an accent Penny can’t place: British, but with a rollicking, rhythmical quality she’s never heard before. “Enough to see it was a fine old place. Which isn’t my kind of place.”

  He smiles, and this is the first time in days someone has looked at Penny warmly, not in the guarded way of strangers. He invites her to join him at Phil’s Pancake House. “It’s terrible. But you’re welcome to dine with me.”

  “Pancakes for dinner?” Penny has been living off sweet-and-sour pork from the Silver Dragon, the only decent restaurant she’s found in the city. “I can’t.”

  “You have stomach problems?”

  “I’m engaged.”

  “Good for you.” He holds out his hand. “I’m David.”

  A MONTH BEFORE LEAVING MONTREAL, Penny stood with Andrew in an empty apartment on Craig Street. They were looking for a place to rent, a place that would be their own once they married. Without meaning to, they seemed only to consider apartments in their neighbourhood. This place—part of a crumbling Victorian row, with a bay window and two dim bedrooms—had exactly the same layout as the one Andrew grew up in.

  “This could be the study,” he said. “We could set up two desks, side by side.”

  Penny smiled, because fiancées were supposed to be happy. She was supposed to look forward to her quiet, studious life with Andrew. She would write her thesis and he would finish his studies. They would listen to classical music; he likes Shostakovich, she Berlioz. They would read to each other in bed.

  “We can paint the walls any colour we want,” Andrew said. “Or hang pictures.”

  But Penny was thinking of Andrew’s mother—her anxious voice, wool skirts, the cuffs of her blouses that she scrubbed each evening so they stayed white. And her own mother, who still wore her old silk dresses and sweaters with pearl buttons. Penny and Donna had laughed mercilessly at their mothers, had believed their own lives would be different.

  “I’ve been offered a job,” she said. “As
a French teacher—a professor.”

  “Our own kitchen, Penny.” Andrew gestured grandly at the grimy counters and oil-splattered walls.

  “The pay is good. But I’d have to move away. To Alberta.”

  “The windows face south, so we’ll get good light.”

  “It’s a year-long contract. It would only be for a year.”

  “And look at this.” Andrew turned the sink’s faucets—first the hot, then the cold. “A kitchen sink, Penny. Our own kitchen sink.”

  PHIL’S SERVES BREAKFAST ALL DAY, so she orders the Cowboy Two-Step: two pancakes, two slices of bacon, two eggs any style. When the plate arrives, she says, “My mother would disown me if she saw me eating like this.”

  “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 clic
ked 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.”