Red Plaid Shirt Page 5

  “I don’t want to be your friend. Will you come to the cabin with me?”

  Val gets up and refills their cups. She’s trying to think of an answer, she doesn’t know what she wants to say.

  Simon says, “I want to get married someday.”

  It is not a question.

  “ I won’t hold you to that.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  Hockey Night in Canada (1982)

  We settled ourselves in our usual places, my father and I, while the singer made his way out onto the ice and the organist cranked up for “O Canada” and “The Star Spangled Banner.” Saturday night and we were ready for anything, my father half sitting, half lying on the chesterfield with his first dark rum and Pepsi, and I in the swivel chair beside the picture window with a box of barbecue chips and a glass of 7Up.

  My mother was ripping apart with relish a red and white polka dot dress she hadn’t worn for years. There were matching red shoes, a purse, and a hat once too, but they’d already been packed or given away. Trying to interest someone in her project and her practicality, she said, “Why, this fabric is just as good as new,” pulling first one sleeve, then the other, away from the body of the dress.

  But the game was starting and we were already intent on the screen and each other.

  “They don’t stand a chance tonight,” I said, shaking my head sadly but with confidence as the players skated out.

  My father grinned calmly and took a drink of rum.

  “Not a chance,” I prodded.

  “We’ll see, we’ll just see about that.” Even when they played poorly for weeks on end, my father remained cheerfully loyal to the Chicago Black Hawks, for no particular reason I could see, except that he always had been. He must have suffered secret doubts about the team now and then—anyone would—but he never let on. I, having no similar special allegiance and wanting to keep the evening interesting, always hoped for the other team.

  We were not violent fans, either one of us. We never hollered, leaped out of our chairs, or pounded ourselves in alternating fits of frustration and ecstasy. We did not jump up and down yelling, “Kill him, kill him!” Instead, we were teasing fans, pretend fans almost, feigning hostility and heartbreak, smirking and groaning gruesomely by turns, exaggerating our reactions mainly for the benefit of the other and sometimes just to get a rise out of my mother, who was by this time humming with pins in her mouth, smoothing pattern pieces onto the remains of the dress, and snipping merrily away with the pinking shears, while scraps of cloth and tissue paper drifted to the floor all around her.

  The dress, I discovered, was to be reincarnated as a blouse for me, a blouse which, by the time it was finished (perfectly, seams all basted and bound, hem hand done), I would probably hate. Between periods, she took me into the bathroom for a fitting session in front of the full-length mirror. I did not breathe, complain, or look as she pinned the blouse together around me, a piece at a time, one sleeve, the other, half the front, the other half, back, collar, the cold silver pins scratching my bare skin just lightly.

  By the time we got to the three-star selection after the game, my mother was off to the back bedroom with the blouse, whirring away on the Singer.

  When her friend, Rita, was there, my mother at least played at watching the game. Whenever the crowd roared, my father groaned, and Rita began to shriek, my mother would look up from her stamp collection, which she was endlessly sorting and sticking and spreading all over the card table, and smile encouragement at the tv.

  “Who scored?” she asked innocently, as she put another page in her album and arranged another row of stamps across it. Russia was her favourite country for collecting, the best because their stamps were bigger and grander than any, especially ours, which looked stingy and common by comparison. The Russians had hockey players, cosmonauts, fruits and vegetables, wild animals, trucks, and ballerinas, in red, blue, green, yellow, even shiny silver and gold. We had mainly the Queen in pastels. My mother’s everyday fear and loathing of Communists did not enter into the matter.

  “Just guess, Violet, just you guess who scored!” Rita crowed.

  “Don’t ask,” my father muttered.

  “Most goals, one team, one game,” Rita recited. “Twenty-one, Montreal Canadiens, March 3, 1920, at Montreal, defeated the Quebec Bulldogs 18 to 3.”

  “Ancient history,” said my father. “Besides, who ever heard of the Quebec Bulldogs anyway? You’re making it all up, Rita. Tell me another one.”

  “Fewest points, one season,” Rita chanted. “Thirty-one, Chicago Black Hawks, 1953–54, won 12, lost 36, tied 4.”

  “Not quite what I had in mind.” My father rolled his big eyes and went into the kitchen to fix more drinks, one for himself and one for Rita, who took her rum with orange juice, no ice. I said nothing, not being sure yet whether I wanted to stick up for my father or fall in love with the Canadiens too.

  Rita had followed the Montreal team for years. Unlike my father and me, she was a real fan, a serious fan who shrieked and howled and paced around the living room, calling the players by their first names, begging them to score, willing them to win with clenched fists and teeth. She did not consider her everyday dislike of those Frenchmen (as in, “I’ve got no use for those Frenchmen, no use at all”) to be contradictory. Hockey, like stamp collecting, it seemed, was a world apart, immune to the regular prejudices of race, province, and country—although she did sometimes berate my father for siding with a Yankee team.

  When the Black Hawks lost another one, Rita and I (for I’d ? been won over after all by her braying) took all the credit for knowing the better team right off the bat, and heaped all the blame upon my father, who was now in disgrace along with his team — a position he took rather well. When they did win, as far as he was concerned, it was all or mainly because he’d never given up on them.

  After the game, my father and I usually played a few hands of poker, a penny a game, with the cards spread out on the chesterfield between us. My mother and Rita were in the kitchen having coffee and maybe a cream puff. The hum of their voices came to me just vaguely, like perfume. I wanted to hear what they were saying but my father was analyzing the last power play and dealing me another hand. I won more often than not, piling up my pennies. For years after this I would think of myself as lucky at cards. In certain difficult situations which showed a disturbing tendency to repeat themselves, I would often be reminded of Rita’s teasing warning: “Lucky at cards, unlucky at love.”

  Later, after Rita had gone home, I would find the ashtray full of lipstick-tipped butts which I pored over, looking for clues.

  My mother had met Rita that summer at Eaton’s, where Rita was working at the Cosmetics counter. Rita still worked at Eaton’s, but she was in Ladies’ Dresses now, having passed briefly through Lingerie and Swimwear in between.

  To hear Rita tell it, you’d think their whole friendship was rooted in my mother’s hair.

  “I just couldn’t help myself,” Rita said, telling me the story. “There I was trying to convince this fat lady that all she really needed was a bottle of Cover Girl and some Midnight Blue mascara and up walked your mother with her hair.”

  Patting her hair fondly, my mother said, “I couldn’t figure out what she was staring at.”

  I already knew that before Rita had come to live in Hastings, she was a hairdresser in Toronto. She’d been to hairdressing school for two years and still took the occasional special course in cold waves or colouring. She was about to open her own beauty parlour just when her husband, Geoffrey, killed himself and everything was changed. It was not long after that that Rita gave up hairdressing and moved to Hastings to stay with her younger sister, Jeanette. Six months after that Jeanette married a doctor and moved back to Toronto. But Rita stayed on in Hastings anyway, bought herself a second-hand car and rented an apartment downtown in the Barclay Block above an Italian bakery (which was the very same building my parents had lived in when they were first married, a fact that I fou
nd significant and somehow too good to be true).

  My mother always did her own hair, putting it up in pincurls every Sunday night so that it lay in lustrous black waves all around her face and rolled thickly down past her shoulders in the back. But what Rita meant was the streak, a pure white streak in front from the time she’d had ringworm when she was small. Even I had to admit it looked splendid and daring, although there were times when we were fighting and I wanted to hurt her and tell her she looked like a skunk. Rita’s own hair was straggly and thin, half-dead from too many washings, a strange salmon colour, growing out blonde, from too many experiments. Her bangs hung down almost to her eyebrows. Sometimes she wore them swept back with coloured barrettes, revealing the delicate blue veins in her temples.

  “Anyway,” Rita said, pausing to light another cigarette with her Zippo, “I finally got rid of the fat lady and your mother and I got talking. Just seeing her hair gave me the itch again—I could just picture all the things I could do with that hair. We went up to the cafeteria for coffee—”

  “And we’ve been friends ever since,” my mother said in a pleased and final-sounding voice, the way you might say, And they all lived happily ever after.

  My mother had never really had a friend of her own before. Oh, there was a neighbour lady, Mrs. Kent three doors down, who would come over once in a while to borrow things that she never returned—the angel food cake pan, the egg beater, the four-sided cheese grater. And so my mother would go over to Mrs. Kent’s house occasionally too, to get the things back. But it was never what you would call a friendship, so much as a case of proximity and Mrs. Kent’s kitchen being sadly ill-equipped.

  I had never seriously thought of my mother as wanting or needing a friend anyway. Friends, particularly best friends, I gathered, were something you grew out of soon after you got married and had children. After that, the husband and the children became your best friends, or were supposed to.

  But then she met Rita, and it was as though Rita were someone she had been just waiting for, saving herself up for all those years. They told each other old stories and secrets, made plans, remembered times before when they might have met, had just missed each other, almost met, but didn’t. Rita was at least ten years younger than my mother. I suppose I thought of her as doing my mother a favour by being her friend. In the way of young girls, I just naturally imagined my mother to be the needy one of the two.

  When Rita was in Cosmetics, she would bring my mother makeup samples that the salesmen had left: mascara, blusher, eyebrow pencils, and sometimes half-empty perfume testers for me. And her pale face was perfect. Once she moved to Ladies Dresses, she hardly ever wore slacks anymore, except when the weather turned cold. She was always trying out bold new accessories, big belts, coloured stockings, high-heeled boots. I could only imagine what she’d bought while she worked in Lingerie — the most elegant underwear, I supposed, and coloured girdles (I didn’t know if there were such things for sure, but if there were, Rita would have several), and marvellous gauzy nightgowns.

  On her day off during the week, Rita was usually there in the kitchen when I came home from school for lunch. While my mother fixed me a can of soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, Rita sipped black coffee and nibbled on fresh fruit and cottage cheese. This was the first time I knew of dieting as a permanent condition, for although Rita was quite slim and long-legged, she was always watching her weight. My mother, who was much rounder than Rita anyway, had taken up dieting too, like a new hobby which required supplies of lettuce, pink grapefruit, and detailed diet books listing menus, recipes, and calories. She’d begun to compliment me on my extreme thinness, when not so many years before she’d made me wear two crinolines to school so the teachers wouldn’t think she didn’t feed me. How was it that, without changing size or shape, I had graduated from grotesque to slender?

  “How’s school going this week?” Rita would ask, offering me a tiny cube of pineapple, which I hated.

  She listened patiently, nodding and frowning mildly, while I told her about Miss Morton, the gym teacher who hated me because I was no good at basketball; and about my best friend, Mary Yurick, who was madly in love with Lorne Puhalski, captain of the hockey team and unattainable; and about everybody’s enemy, Bonnie Ettinger, who’d beat up Della White on Monday in the alley behind the school.

  It was easy to get carried away with such confidences in the hope that Rita would reciprocate, and I almost told her that I was in love with Lorne Puhalski too, and that Bonnie Ettinger was going around saying she’d knock my block off if she ever got the chance. But I talked myself out of it at the last minute. I wanted so much to have Rita all to myself but somehow it never was arranged.

  With Rita there, my mother could listen to my problems without worrying too much or wanting to do something about them. She and I probably learned more about each other from those kitchen conversations with Rita than we ever would have any other way.

  Sometimes it was as though they’d forgotten all about me. One day when I came home for lunch my mother was sitting wrapped in a sheet on the high stool in the middle of the kitchen while Rita gave her a cold wave, something she’d been threatening to do for weeks. I made my own sandwich.

  My mother was saying, “I was so young then, and everybody said I was pretty. We were in love but when they found out, they shipped him off to agricultural school in Winnipeg. I still think Sonny was my own true love.”

  “What about Ted?” Rita asked, wrapping pieces of hair in what looked like cigarette rolling papers and then winding them nimbly onto pink plastic rods.

  “Oh, Ted.”

  Ted was my father, of course, but it was strange to hear my mother call him by his name when usually she called him “Dad” or “your Dad.”

  “Yes, well, Ted. That was different. I was older. I’m even older now. I didn’t tell Ted about Sonny until long after we were married.”

  I went back to school that afternoon with a picture of my mother as another person altogether, someone I had never met and never would now. This woman, mysterious, incomplete and broken-hearted, pestered me all day long. The stink of the cold wave chemicals lingered too, bitter but promising.

  At other times it was as though my mother could tell me things through Rita that she could never have expressed if we were alone.

  One Saturday night after the hockey game I left my father dozing on the chesterfield and went into the kitchen.

  Rita was saying, “When Geoffrey hung himself, his whole family blamed me. They said I’d driven him to it. They kept bringing up the baby who died and then Geoffrey too, as if I’d murdered them both with my bare hands. I had a nervous breakdown and they said it served me right. It was then that I realized I would have to leave town.” She spoke calmly, looking down at her lap, not moving, and a sense of young tragic death wound around her like scented bandages, permanent and disfiguring, the way Japanese women used to bind their feet to keep them dainty. She was doomed somehow, I could see that now, even though I’d never noticed it before.

  “You have to be strong, we all have to be strong,” my mother said without looking at me. “We’re the women, we have to be stronger than they think we are.”

  I could hear my father snoring lightly in the other room, no longer harmless. The kitchen was snug with yellow light. The window was patterned with frost like feathers or ferns and it was just starting to snow. My mother pulled the blind down so no one could see in. We could have been anywhere, just the three of us, bending in together around the kitchen table, knowing things, these sad things, that no one else knew yet.

  That night Rita slept over. An odd thing for grown-ups to do, I thought, but I liked it.

  After I’d gone to bed, it reminded me of Christmas: something special waiting all night long in the living room: the tree, the unopened presents, Rita in my mother’s new nightie wrapped up in an old car blanket on the chesterfield.

  Around the middle of December, Rita flew to Toronto to have Christmas with her si
ster, Jeanette, and her doctor husband. My mother had somehow not considered exchanging presents with Rita and was horrified when she appeared the morning she left with three gaily wrapped boxes, one for each of us. Even more surprising was my father, who handed Rita a little package tied up with curly red ribbons. She opened it on the spot, still standing in the doorway, and produced a silver charm of the Montreal Canadiens’ crest.

  On Christmas morning we opened her presents first. She’d given my mother a white silk scarf hand-painted with an ocean scene in vivid blues and greens. My father held up a red Chicago Black Hawks jersey with the Indian head on the front and the number 21 on the back. I got a leather-covered datebook for the new year in which I immediately noted the birthdays of everyone I could think of. Rita’s presents were the best ones that year.

  After dinner, we called all our relatives in Manitoba and then my mother took some pictures of the tree, of my father in his new hockey sweater, and of me eating my dessert behind the chicken carcass. My friend, Mary, called and we told each other everything we got. I thought Rita might call later but she didn’t.

  Between Christmas and New Year’s, my mother went out and bought a braided gold necklace to give to Rita when she got back. The silver charm was never discussed in front of me.

  Not long after Rita returned from her holidays, she was moved from Ladies’ Dresses into Ladies’ Coats. Now when she came over she wore a knee-length black coat trimmed with grey Persian lamb at the collar and cuffs. She always hesitated before taking it off, caressing the curly lapels, picking off invisible lint, giving my mother and me just enough time to notice and admire it again. She knew a lot about mink and ermine now, how the little things were bred and raised on special farms, how vicious they were, how many tiny pelts it took to make just one coat. She lusted uncontrollably, as she put it, after one particular mink coat in her department but had resigned herself to never being able to afford it and seemed both relieved and disappointed the day it was bought by some doctor’s wife.