I tapped and crept my way along the damp sidewalk. There was a full moon, ringed with a pale haze; under the street lights my foreshortened shadow slid before me like a goblin. I felt I was doing a daring thing: an older woman, solitary, walking by night. A stranger might have considered me defenceless. And indeed I was a little frightened, or at least apprehensive enough to make my heart beat harder. As Myra keeps telling me so kindly, old ladies are prime targets for muggers. They are said to come in from Toronto, these muggers, as all ills do. Probably they come in on the bus, their mugging tools disguised as umbrellas, or as golf clubs. There are no lengths to which they will not go, says Myra darkly.
I went three blocks to the main route through town, then stopped to gaze across the satiny wet tarmac towards Walter’s garage. Walter was sitting in the lighthouse of the glass booth, in the middle of the inky, empty pool of flat asphalt. Leaning forward in his red cap, he looked like an aging jockey on an invisible horse, or like the captain of his fate, piloting an eerie ship through outer space. In point of fact he was watching The Sports Network on his miniature TV, as I happen to know from Myra. I did not go over to speak to him: he would have been alarmed by the sight of me, looming out of the darkness in my rubber boots and nightgown like some crazed octogenarian stalker. Still, it was comforting to know that there was at least one other human being awake at that time of night.
On the way back I heard footsteps behind me. Now you’ve done it, I told myself, here comes the mugger. But it was only a young woman in a black raincoat, carrying a bag or small suitcase. She passed me at a fast clip, head craned forward.
Sabrina, I thought. She’s come back after all. How forgiven I felt, for that instant—how blessed, how filled with grace, as if time had rolled backwards and my dry old wooden cane had burst operatically into flower. But on second glance—no, on third—it was not Sabrina at all; only some stranger. Who am I anyway, to deserve such a miraculous outcome? How can I expect it?
I do expect it though. Against all reason.
But enough of that. I take up the burden of my tale, as they used to say in poems. Back to Avilion.
Mother was dead. Things would never be the same. I was told to keep a stiff upper lip. Who told me that? Reenie certainly, Father perhaps. Funny, they never say anything about the lower lip. That’s the one you’re supposed to bite, to substitute one kind of pain for another.
At first Laura used to spend a lot of time inside Mother’s fur coat. It was made of sealskin, and still had Mother’s handkerchief in the pocket. Laura would get inside it and try to do up the buttons, until she hit on a way of doing them up first and then crawling in underneath. I think she must have been praying in there, or conjuring: conjuring Mother back. Whatever it was, it didn’t work. And then the coat was given away to charity.
Soon Laura began to ask where the baby had gone, the one that did not look like a kitten. To Heaven no longer satisfied her—after it was in the basin, was what she meant. Reenie said the doctor took it away. But why wasn’t there a funeral? Because it was born too little, said Reenie. How could anything so little kill Mother? Reenie said, Never mind. She said, You’ll know when you’re older. She said, What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.
In the nighttimes Laura would creep into my room and shake me awake, then climb into bed with me. She couldn’t sleep: it was because of God. Up until the funeral, she and God had been on good terms. God loves you, said the Sunday-school teacher at the Methodist church, where Mother had sent us, and where Reenie continued to send us on general principles, and Laura had believed it. But now she was no longer so sure.
She began to fret about God’s exact location. It was the Sunday-school teacher’s fault: God is everywhere, she’d said, and Laura wanted to know: was God in the sun, was God in the moon, was God in the kitchen, the bathroom, was he under the bed? (“I’d like to wring that woman’s neck,” said Reenie.) Laura didn’t want God popping out at her unexpectedly, not hard to understand considering his recent behaviour. Open your mouth and dose your eyes and I’ll give you a big surprise, Reenie used to say, holding a cookie behind her back, but Laura would no longer do it. She wanted her eyes open. It wasn’t that she distrusted Reenie, only that she feared surprises.
Probably God was in the broom closet. It seemed the most likely place. He was lurking in there like some eccentric and possibly dangerous uncle, but she couldn’t be certain whether he was there at any given moment because she was afraid to open the door. “God is in your heart,” said the Sunday-school teacher, and that was even worse. If in the broom closet, something might have been possible, such as locking the door.
God never slept, it said in the hymn—No careless slumber shall His eyelids dose. Instead he roamed around the house at night, spying on people—seeing if they’d been good enough, or sending plagues to finish them off, or indulging in some other whim. Sooner or later he was bound to do something unpleasant, as he’d often done in the Bible. “Listen, that’s him,” Laura would say. The light footstep, the heavy footstep.
“That’s not God. It’s only Father. He’s in the turret.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Smoking.” I didn’t want to say drinking. It seemed disloyal.
I felt most tenderly towards Laura when she was asleep—her mouth a little open, her eyelashes still wet—but she was a restless sleeper; she groaned and kicked, and snored sometimes, and kept me from getting to sleep myself. I would climb down out of the bed and tiptoe across the floor, and hoist myself up to look out the bedroom window. When there was a moon the flower gardens would be silvery grey, as if all the colours had been sucked out of them. I could see the stone nymph, foreshortened; the moon was reflected in her lily pond, and she was dipping her toes into its cold light. Shivering, I would get back into bed, and lie watching the moving shadows of the curtains and listening to the gurglings and crackings of the house as it shifted itself. Wondering what I’d done wrong.
Children believe that everything bad that happens is somehow their fault, and in this I was no exception; but they also believe in happy endings, despite all evidence to the contrary, and I was no exception in that either. I only wished the happy ending would hurry up, because—especially at night, when Laura was asleep and I did not have to cheer her up—I felt so desolate.
In the mornings I would help Laura to dress—that had been my task even when Mother was alive—and make sure she brushed her teeth and washed her face. At lunchtime Reenie would sometimes let us have a picnic. We’d have buttered white bread spread with grape jelly translucent as cellophane, and raw carrots, and cut-up apples. We’d have corned beef turned out of the tin, the shape of it like an Aztec temple. We’d have hard-boiled eggs. We’d put these things on plates, and take them outside, and eat them here and there—by the pool, in the conservatory. If it was raining we’d eat them inside.
“Remember the starving Armenians,” Laura would say, hands clasped, eyes closed, bowing over the crusts of her jelly sandwich. I knew she was saying it because Mother used to, and it made me want to cry. “There are no starving Armenians, they’re just made up,” I told her once, but she wouldn’t have it.
We were left on our own a lot at that time. We learned Avilion inside out: its crevices, its caves, its tunnels. We peered into the hiding place under the back stairs, which contained a jumble of discarded overshoes and single mittens, and an umbrella with broken ribs. We explored the various branches of the cellar—me coal cellar for the coal; the root cellar for the cabbages and squashes laid out on a board, and the beets and carrots growing whiskery in their box of sand, and the potatoes with their blind albino tentacles, like the legs of crabs; the cold cellar for the apples in their barrels, and for the shelves of preserves—dusty jams and jellies glinting like uncut gems, chutneys and pickles and strawberries and peeled tomatoes and applesauce, all in Crown sealing jars. There was a wine cellar too, but it was kept locked; only Father had the key.