The View From the Lane and Other Stories Page 11

  “Yeah, so what would yours say?” I said.

  “I kind of like the simple, classic message, something like, fuck off, just fuck off all of you, maybe or, I’m doing this so that I’ll never have to look at your face again. Then the person finding it would wonder if it was meant for them.”

  “I’d want to settle scores,” I said. “And then be gone without hearing the response.”

  “You see that’s your problem. You’d start writing and then that way you have of trying to see all sides of something, you’d still be writing the next day, and when would you actually kill yourself?” The bread popped. I went to the counter, smothered the toast in butter and brought the plate back to the table. We were drinking tea. I tried to think what I’d write, gazing out the window at the sullied yards, but my attention was drawn again and again to the sound of the television on in the living room.

  “How about this: This morning I saw the enormous schnoz of Mr. Halpenny and thought I could no longer live in a world with such ugliness.” Landy said. “It was kind of the thought I had when I saw him, only it seemed it should be him who should die, not me.”

  “There’s lots of examples of ugliness at school,” I said. “There’s that smell that radiates off Mrs. Chadwick.”

  “Yeah, her whole body smells like feet. And then there’s that near-sighted idiot Mr. Moran.” Whenever Landy spoke with him, she’d call him Mr. Moron, and he would patiently say, No, Mr. Moran, with an ‘a’. And she would then say, “Oh sorry”, but continue calling him Moron. “He thinks I’m slow, that I can’t remember,” she said.

  “This would be funny: I can’t stand for one more minute to live with the memories of what Mr. Grant has done to me, horrible things, involving dogs and leashes, and so this is my only recourse.”

  “That would be funny and mean,” I said. Mr. Grant was a shy, withdrawn Geography teacher, who had trouble meeting your eye when he spoke.

  “Well most funny things are,” she said absently, intent on her writing. “I bequeath my family to science. Studying them should explain why I am doing this. What do you think of that one?”

  “I think I’d stick with the one you wrote the other day, what was it? Oh yes, what excuse can I make except I’m inconsolably bored. I like the ‘inconsolably’, I like that word,” I said.

  “Or something concise, obvious: I’m sick of this waste of time. Or: What lies ahead doesn’t look good, so I’m checking out now.”

  We heard the sound of quivering violin coming from the soap opera on the television. “I know,” Landy said. She was animated and looked pretty, her eyes wide and full of good humour. “I leave you the deceit, the cruelty, the stupidity. Have fun with that.”

  Later, on the chesterfield, watching the gauzy scene of a couple embracing, she said, “See the way the camera stays on his face?” The scene was ending and the camera pulling away from the actor and actress. “That’s because he’s making her so sick, she’s throwing up on his shoulder.”

  z

  Landy’s brother Willie was a large boy, with a wide, toothy grin and the same sturdy bone structure as his mother. He was destined to always look like a large boy, even when he was a man. It took me a while to realize what made him different was not that he was simple or slow, labels others put on him, but how fundamentally kind his nature was. His endearing way allowed him a sense of wonder in things others often overlooked. I remember him in the back yard finding beetles and running to show them to us as we sat on the veranda drinking soda and complaining about the neighbours. “Look at this quickly,” he’d say. “I have to get him back; I think he’s scared to be out of the grass.” He rode his bicycle everywhere and enjoyed it in a way we had long forgotten, if in fact we had ever been capable of feeling that kind of joy at something so simple. When the debates and arguments escalated in his home, he would watch the television, shifting position to see his program while ignoring the noise and chaos surrounding him. Landy was closer to him than anyone else in her home.

  z

  On one of my visits to Landy’s house, her father said to me, “Is that your mother who waits for the bus by the rock near Isidore?” He was dressed in boxer shorts, T-shirt, a short robe hanging open over his rotund form, his hair uncombed, and he held a spatula that dripped bacon grease, lifting it for emphasis as he spoke.

  “Maybe.”

  “The one with the raccoon fur coat, the pretty one?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” I said. The coat was given to my mother by her sister Margaret and when my mother first modeled it for me, I said, “No matter how good it looks, it would always look better on the animal”.

  “She’s a good-looking woman,” he said. My mother as pretty was a foreign concept, she seemed simply too functional and accessible to be really attractive.

  “Dad,” Landy said. “Stop it.”

  “I only asked Audrey because you wouldn’t tell me,” he said turning to glare at her.

  Landy shoved me into her room. Our homes were part of a housing development and so both had the same layout, but in Landy’s house they used the dining room for her bedroom. She had put a blanket up to separate it from the living room, a blanket she pulled back with a clothes peg to open, like a tent. “God, I hate when he starts that,” she said.

  “Starts what?” I said.

  “You know, talking about women.” She sat on the unmade bed. The room was dark; the cold of an overcast February day seeping in. “Now that he knows who your mom is, he’ll stop to talk to her.” I couldn’t imagine why he’d want to do this, why he’d look at another woman, when his wife seemed to me quite beautiful, and he seemed instead ordinary, peasant solid, and a bit slow formulating thoughts.

  “You see,” Landy said. “You see, why I’d rather go to your place?” She was angry with me. She was often angry with me. If I said something she thought wrong, or even something she did not know and she inferred mockery at her ignorance, she would turn with anger and contempt. “And what do you mean by that? Huh? What makes you an expert?” Her anger often escalated, especially when I refused to argue with her, with her leaving wherever we were—the cafeteria at school, the kitchen table at my place, or walking faster to leave me alone on the road. She’d often turn back to say something like, “Once, just once, I’d like you to say what you really think. But no, you’re too spineless.”

  z

  The pathway beside Landy’s house where the dogs roamed was dense with undergrowth, burrs, weeds and shrubs, lined by an old chain-link fence that separated her yard from the school field. A trail, where the earth was worn smooth as leather and children had bent the wire fence, created a shortcut. I have a photograph of Landy on this pathway, her cat, Tigger, on her shoulder. We both had cats, cats that lounged on our bedspreads, jumped on the tables and windowsills, and slept beside us; this love of cats was something that linked us. One of Landy’s, a lanky tomcat, had learnt how to open the kitchen door of my house. We’d hear the latch flick and then Junior, as he was known, would saunter into the living room. I heard my mother once tell a friend, ‘if you hear the back door opening, don’t worry, it’s the neighbour’s cat coming for a visit,’ and it seemed these visits were just one more sign of the eccentric but accepted character of our neighbourhood.

  My mother had always loved animals, was always leaving food on the back porch for the neighbourhood dogs and as a result of the affection she held for Junior, Landy and she became friends of sorts. When she’d arrive home from work, stomping snow off her galoshes in the vestibule, Landy would meet her and tell her about Junior’s exploits: a midnight stroll into a neighbour’s basement, the time he fell asleep in the truck of the man who delivered vegetables and ended up at his farm overnight, or how she saw Junior on the roof of a neighbour’s house looking down at the street. And my mother, to my great annoyance, would laugh and say, “That Junior, what a hoot!” My mother’s language was a source of constant
irritation for me, the most despicable of boys who hung about the streets were lads, when something perturbed her she’d say with indignation oh, fiddledy, and instead of butt or ass, she’d refer to a person’s rear as a seaty-go-hind. The way I dressed, jeans with a ragged hem, sweaters too big, my thick black eyeliner and bangs that almost covered my eyes, all these hallmarks of my appearance, she claimed gave her a headache. “Oh, I can’t look at you,” she’d say, “or that headache will come back.” My exasperation was sincere, but to Landy my conversations with my mother were often a source of mirth, something to joke about, or mimic when we were in a crowd.

  Near Christmas of the year I was in grade ten, my mother found a batch of our suicide notes and confronted me. “What are these? What are you two doing after school?” I explained they were a joke, that most of them were Landy’s, but she stood rigid in the doorway to my room, radiating anger, or perhaps, I realize now, something more like worry or concern. “Can you please tell me how suicide notes could possibly be funny?” she said, crushing the paper in her hand. “No, this is important, you must be careful.” And as she turned to leave, she said in a softened voice, “I don’t understand you, I just don’t understand how you think sometimes.” I was glad my mother had not found the last few notes Landy had written, serious notes that she’d not shared or discussed, and that I found only after she left. There is no end to the pain, she wrote and on another sheet, this must end. The next day when I asked her about them she said she had not meant them, “and besides they’re unfinished”.

  An hour after my mother had asked me about the notes, when I was lying on my bed reading, she came to the door again. “I think I’ve found a part-time job you’d like.” Her friend was a manager at the cinema that was part of the new shopping center not far from our home and she’d told my mother they were looking for a person to work at the candy bar. And so a week later I started work there, making vats of popcorn, selling cola and chocolate bars until I moved to the more lauded position of selling tickets for the movies. It meant that I was not home most evenings, but when I would arrive Landy would often be sitting with my mother either in the kitchen having tea at the same table where we used to sit after school, or in the living room, watching television, Junior curled on my mother’s lap.

  z

  When my brother moved back home from the psychiatric hospital where he’d been during my high school years, I moved away and began working in a government office, living alone in an apartment in the south end of the city. During the last year I lived with my mother, Landy quit school and worked at a nearby laundromat. The experience taught her she needed her high school credentials and so she began to attend an academy that would give her an equivalency diploma. The program provided a stipend for housing and food, and she moved into a boarding house in the Glebe, where she had a room large enough for a bed, a bookcase and dresser. She shared a washroom with two other people and this sharing provided a long litany of complaints, which I would hear if I called or went to see her. The occupants of the boarding house were mostly students, bleary eyed, coming and going on bikes at all times of the day or night, as well as older destitute people, who lived alone and tried to ignore the students as they raced by. Although Landy was young and a student, she seemed more like one of the older, sadder tenants. The winter I was twenty-one, I used to visit her in the boarding house, when she’d tell me she was surviving on cottage cheese and canned carrots. “It’s really quite tasty,” she said. “And nutritious.” She lost weight and her hair, which she’d cut short, darkened.

  z

  Near the end of that year I met the man I later married. He lived in the same apartment building where I lived and had a taciturn nature, which was often mistaken for one of contemplation and thoughtfulness. I would come to think of this year, 1975, as the year my world imploded and the movement toward novelty and increased mobility, which had begun when I was a teenager, started to slow and then retract. When I introduced Landy to my future husband, once we were alone, he said, “Well, that was gross.” He meant the crowded room where she lived, the smell of meat cooking in the hallways, the mass of bikes piled near the door like the remnants from an accident. I did not respond and he said, “And she seems weird too.”

  The following summer I married this man; the small ceremony took place in a B&B in the quiet town where my husband and I moved after the wedding. Landy came alone to the ceremony and sat with a group of my husband’s friends but did not speak with them. Later, I was told they’d laughed at her attitude and appearance, saying she looked like a schoolmarm. When I heard their comments, I felt a pang of anger and a desire to defend her against their jovial, nonchalantly cruel assessment. How could they not see who Landy was, her capabilities, her humour, her uniqueness? “That dress was mine,” I said to my husband. “I gave it to her years ago, and besides she doesn’t want those goons you call friends bothering her.” In the photograph I framed and kept on the buffet in the living room, she stands a little apart from the group, her smile crooked and uncertain.

  Shortly after I married I became pregnant and my life became preoccupied with caring for my son. My friendships now were mostly with other young mothers who had children of the same age and my days had become a routine crowded with domestic concerns and obligations. When I’d visit the city to see my mother, I’d call Landy but our connection was growing more and more tenuous.

  “What’s the deal with you?” she asked one day in a restaurant where we had met for coffee and when the conversation had stalled. “Just happy to be looking after the kiddy?” I could have defended myself, but I saw how her face had aged, the lines pronounced and something haunted in her eyes, which now instead of blue looked grey. Her hair, already showing grey, was pulled behind her ears in a flat ponytail.

  “Is that so wrong?”

  She looked away from me and I could tell she did not want to argue. “No, I guess not,” she said with genuine weariness.

  z

  Two years after this meeting Landy moved to Toronto. An adventure, she wrote in her first letter after moving, but gradually the letters slowed, and the tone changed. There’s some strange stuff that happens in a big city, she wrote. She lived a spartan life with a cat in a bachelor apartment off St. Clair Avenue. The walls were soiled looking in the stringent light of that April day when I visited for the first time. In the living room she had placed a single straight-back chair and the large lazy-boy, still ripped, that her mother had sat in for weeks after she was discharged from the hospital. When she made tea and we sat together (I was on the lazy-boy, she on the straight chair), I could hear the sound of water dripping from a roof as the snow melted, and see the view outside her window of old apartment buildings and squat strip malls desolate in the overcast. “So,” I said after a few moments of mounting silence, “how are your parents? And Honey and Willie?”

  “I don’t speak to anyone but Willie and he’s okay.” Which were more words strung together than she had spoken since I arrived. But speaking of her brother had always lifted her mood and she told me he visited the month before and they’d gone to the nature museum.

  “He’d like that,” I said. A streetcar rumbled by.

  “He had such a bad crush on you,” she said.

  “Really, you never told me that.”

  “Oh, yeah, when you married, it broke his heart.” She looked down at her hands in her lap and watching her I was brought back to earlier that day when my husband had asked why I was visiting Landy. He was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper, and when I turned to answer the early morning light was so brilliant it obstructed my view, so that I could not tell if he was looking at me, or still reading the paper.

  “I’m sorry if Willie was hurt. He is such a good person,” I said.

  “Really?” she said, looking up at me I noticed the slackness of the skin around her eyes. “You’re sorry?” She took the shawl from the arm of the chair and placed i
t around her shoulders. “He’d have liked to know that.”

  z

  More than a year later I received a telephone call from Honey telling me that Willie had died. “Landy refused to call you,” Honey said. “But I thought you should know.” He was twenty-five and had been hit by a truck while riding his bike on a highway.

  The next day my husband and I drove to town and when I entered the funeral parlour the first person I saw was Landy. She was standing near the door, speaking to her mother’s sister, a small, darkly-clad woman who wore a tight black kerchief on her head. When she saw me Landy said, “You didn’t have to come you know.”

  “But I wanted to,” I said.

  The wood-paneled room was crowded with relatives and the sound of their muted conversations; an anxious solemnity pervaded. I could tell Landy had been crying and I noticed her hands shaking.

  She took my hand, not speaking, keeping her head lowered, until Honey called her to a group crowded around the closed casket and she left me with my husband, who had just entered the room after parking the car and having a cigarette. He said, “Do we have to stay much longer?” Later, in the chapel, before the service started, Landy came and sat beside me in the wooden pew, leaving her family in the front row. My reluctant husband was on one side of me, Landy on the other, and the three of us sat without touching or speaking for the half hour it took to complete the service.

  z

  Almost a decade after Willie’s death, on a cold winter day, my husband told me that he’d fallen in love with someone at work and was leaving. My son had already chosen the university he’d attend and I was working in a bookstore on the main street of our small town. I’d be lying if I said I’d not noticed our lives dulling to work days spent apart, nights before a television and weekends when we seldom spoke and we each pursued separate interests. By this time Landy and I saw less of each other and so it wasn’t until I’d left the small town that had been my home for almost twenty years and found an apartment and job in the city that I told her of my marriage breakdown. She told me we were destroying more than we knew and on that point she was right. I had no idea how deep the roots had become, how devastating the break. “What did you think, Amy?” she said to me that night. “That you’d call me and I would commiserate and you could feel better?”