The View From the Lane and Other Stories Read online

  An elderly woman and a younger man were in the front seat—Philip saw a line of blood on the woman’s forehead and the man was moaning slightly but otherwise looked unharmed. There was something vulnerable in the silent way they were positioned side by side, as if sleeping, so that his first inclination was to turn away. Before heading back to the plow to call for help, he heard the woman moan and when he looked back she’d opened her eyes and was moving her mouth to speak, but she made no sound.

  z

  In the sixties she’d been a star, a comedienne who appeared on television shows featuring singing puppets and acrobats. Her thin legs beneath a dress which flared above her knees and her blonde hair teased high on her head made her look like a ludicrous doll. She squinted as she spoke and then opened her eyes wide to listen, puffing on a cigarette through a long holder while the audience laughed.

  A decade later, when there were no longer variety shows that fit her type of humour, her popularity fell so that she was forced to play smaller venues or open for more popular comics. She divorced her husband, changed to a more tailored look—trousers and satin blouses—and flattened her hair, letting it return to its natural dark colour. Her look and single lifestyle provided new material, and she now portrayed her ex-husband as not only buffoonish, but also stupid and malicious. She was invited to appear on afternoon talk shows and comedy revues, but as the years went by and these venues dried up, her son, who was now her manager, arranged for a full agenda of work in community centers and dinner clubs. She preferred Florida where it was warm and the seniors remembered her, but she performed throughout the United States and into Canada. That was why in the winter of 1996, when she was in her mid-seventies, during the worst snowstorm of the year, she found herself in a ditch one Saturday evening on a back road between Ottawa and Toronto, close to the small town where I lived.

  Typical of villages and towns in the area, the main street was predominantly stone and red brick Georgian buildings with white shutters that accented windows displaying candlesticks, wall hangings and decorative throws. Within the previous ten years, in an attempt to entice tourists, the older buildings in the town’s core had been turned into gift shops and restaurants. At the end of the main street where the two central roads of the town met, there was a grey stone building that until sixty years ago had been a working mill. In summer, when visitors walked along the main street, they could feel the mist from the falls on their skin, and smell the churning water, a musty smell like the inside of cellars or other abandoned rooms. Most of the buildings in town were newer and less elaborate than those of the main street—there were clapboard houses and duplexes and bungalows with a mixture of siding and stucco.

  Our house was red brick, small but with a large back yard. On the front lawn was a sign we bought the year we were married, shortly after we moved from the city. It had our names, Amy and Philip Graves, painted on it in green, and in the summer, marigolds and creeping white phlox grew beneath it, a flowerbed of white and gold that did nothing to uncover the complex moods and growing silence of our house. When I’d hear the sign squeaking from the living room I knew the wind outside had picked up, that a storm was on its way.

  A few years after we moved here, we built a large porch on the front and a sunroom on the back. When I wasn’t working at the bookstore—I spent most of my work days sitting on a high stool reading—I often sat in the sunroom, crocheting or doing needlework, and in winter watching the wind arrange the snow into shapes like large white stones smoothed by years of flowing water.

  By the winter of 1995, I had lived in this house over nineteen years. Thomas, my son, who’d been born here eighteen years earlier, was finishing high school and anxious to move away. Often during dinner he’d be silent, and when his gaze would move to the window I knew he was thinking about his future, which university he’d attend and what he’d find there.

  The afternoon of the cold day in February when the comedienne had her accident, I stood by the window, peeling turnips for dinner and watching the sky change from icy blue to navy above yards of pale mauve snow. I felt a chill and wrapped my sweater, which hung loosely from my shoulders, around me. After I had finished preparing dinner, a light snow began to fall and I called to my husband, “Looks like it’s starting.” Philip worked for the township and during the winter he was one of the crews that cleared the roads and highway. I knew soon he would dress in his work clothes and boots and drive his truck the half mile to the municipal compound—also the police and fire station—mount the plow enclosed in the pen behind the building, and begin clearing the snow. When the storm was extreme, it was difficult to see where the turns or laneways were, his only indication being the cone-shaped glow of the street lamps.

  While he was out on the back roads, Thomas and I ate the dinner I had prepared that afternoon—roast pork, potatoes, turnips, with apple pie for dessert. We sat at the dining room table, as was our Sunday custom and, while Philip, whose chair sat empty, was descending the back road that led to the comedienne and her son, Thomas and I discussed his plans for the fall.

  “I’d really prefer to go to Toronto; the program is the best in the country.” He’d applied at both the university in Toronto and Edmonton and would hear shortly where he was accepted. He ate quickly, distractedly, and interrupted our conversation once to answer the phone. “I’m eating right now, call you back in ten,” he said in a rushed voice. When he left the table I took our plates to the kitchen and looked through the window at the back yard now obscured by the storm—trees, the fences, even the weirdly lit pinkish sky, all erased by the snow.

  z

  My husband told me about finding the comedienne and her son in their car when he returned home early the next morning. We were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, his hand around the mug for its warmth, dressed still in his work clothes because he’d be leaving again shortly. Snow crusted in the creases of his trousers and jacket melted slowly as he spoke in a contemplative way about how the white of the blizzard was blinding and when he finally came across the car, he had difficulty seeing it against the snow. “So what did you do?” I asked.

  “What else could I do—I went to the plow, called for an ambulance and kept on plowing so they could get to the hospital.”

  When a doctor saw the comedienne, he determined she had a concussion, and they recommended she stay for tests. One of her first requests was to meet the man who’d found and helped them to reach the hospital. Philip asked me to join him and then suggested that rather than take the truck we walk.

  The comedienne was in a single room propped on a pillow, wearing the pink satin sleeping jacket she’d insisted her son retrieve from the car—the Lincoln being repaired at the local garage. Her skin had a soft powdery look, dullish, but her eyes were bright and wet. “Sit over here, my dear,” she said to me, pointing to the chair closest to her. Her hands, knotted with veins, were propped on her stomach.

  “Well, first,” she said, “I want to thank you for what you did for me and my boy, here,” she lifted her hand and took hold of the cuff of her son’s jacket. He smiled down without moving his head. He was tall, with thick dark hair, dressed in a tweed jacket, and his silence seemed less a sign of shyness or reticence than of boredom.

  “I was only doing my job,” Philip said.

  She responded, “Well, even so, you do your job well.” She finished by saying, “If you’re ever in LA, come and see me. I have a big house where I live alone, now that my son is married, and I love visitors.”

  I said I’d like that, although I knew it was unlikely we would ever visit Los Angeles.

  We smiled at each other with apparently nothing left to say, until the comedienne said quickly to Philip, “You look like my ex.” She turned to her son. “Doesn’t he look like your dad?” Her son grimaced, which could have meant he agreed or that he simply didn’t care. “Don’t take this wrong, he was a good-looking man when he was your age
. It was later when he turned into a slug that he lost some of his charm.”

  Her son said the first words I’d heard him speak, “You don’t have to do your routine now, Mother,” and left the room.

  “Do you have children?” she asked, not waiting for a reply. “It’s best to kill them at around ten before they become so much smarter than you.”

  “He’s eighteen,” I said.

  “Too late,” She moved herself up on one arm. “Well good, now he’s gone I can smoke, over there, under the sweater, there’s a pack.”

  I found it and Philip said, “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  She smiled at me and said, “Men and kids,” and I laughed.

  z

  “Well, that was fun,” I said when we were walking home. Philip was not listening to me instead he was staring at the road. “Don’t you agree? I mean she didn’t have to ask to see you.” He didn’t answer.

  I was forty-one years old and wore my hair short, honey brown with blonde streaks, a recent change, recommended by my hairdresser. My eyes were brown; I was five feet, four inches, and I had an overlapping front tooth, which I hated. Philip was forty-five and balding—something I never mentioned to him. He wore a beard, was average height and thin. I say these things now because I want you to see us on the road walking home, a man in jeans, a beige winter coat, the woman wearing a duffel coat, black trousers and a beige toque. It was cold and I want you to see the white of our breath when we spoke and to hear the way the snow beneath us, hard as marble, squeaked when we walked. I want you to notice how the man stares ahead through the cold and how the woman turns every few minutes to look at him.

  I had often walked on this street on my way to or from work, but walking beside Philip on this day felt different. His silence, his refusal to look at me, added to the coldness in the air. When we arrived at our home with the door closed behind us, I asked, “What’s wrong?” giving voice to a dread that had been growing for longer than I could bear to admit.

  After he answered my question, I went upstairs to our bedroom and a while later he left the house. I heard the door close. There’s a mistaken idea that the absence of sound cannot be heard, but after Philip left it was all I could hear, as I lay in bed, the blankets to my chin, rocking slightly.

  z

  After Thomas had left for school the next morning, to escape the silence I decided to visit the comedienne. It was a whim. When she had asked me to drop by, I had no intention of taking her up on the invitation. On my walk to the hospital, the stiff white landscape lay on either side of the road and the clouds were thin wisps before a durable blue sky.

  “Well, how nice,” the comedienne said when she saw me. I asked about the hospital, if she was being treated well but she did not respond. Instead she looked at me with a shrewd expression and said, “There’s something wrong.” I looked at the floor, at the tiles, the grout around each square and the metal rungs at the side of her bed. I knew she was watching me but I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “You know my husband and I separated when I lost my job. He couldn’t handle that I was no longer popular,” she said, smoothing the blanket that lay over her, and then looking at me. “I could see something when you visited yesterday, a distance between the two of you. I noticed it.”

  “He wants to leave,” I said after a moment silence. “He’s met someone where he works. He said we haven’t talked for years, and apparently he can talk to this woman.” When I looked up I noticed the pale blue of her eyes, and a settled kind of resolve in them, almost like an illness.

  z

  The comedienne had begun her life as a daughter among seven daughters in a poor family, supported by her father’s job as a butcher in a small town in Michigan. She told me about her sisters who never came to see her perform and with whom she had lost touch over the years. At twenty she met her husband, when she was working as a secretary, and within two years they married and had their first child. Her husband worked on the assembly line of one of the large car companies until he was forced to quit his job because of an accident, and the comedienne in turn was forced to find work. She began at a radio station as office manager, then producer and, not long after, hosted her own show. In 1962 she moved to TV, performing on variety shows and then movies where she’d play the maid or next-door neighbour. I saw one of her movies when I was young—in it she was the kooky friend of the heroine’s mother and wore a fierce magenta wig that looked like bedroom slippers tufted around her head. She spent the movie spying on the main actors, then gossiping about them to her bored husband.

  z

  While she was hospitalized, I visited the comedienne every day, either before or after working at the bookstore where I had a part-time job. On the last morning when I arrived, I found her in bed, the television on mute, while out her window a light snow was falling. When she saw me, she said, “Doesn’t it do anything around here but snow?”

  “Not much else,” I said and sat beside her on the bed. She told me about the snowstorms when she was growing up, about her sisters and parents and as she talked she laughed about everything, even things—like her estrangement from her sisters—I thought were sad. She called her husband “a goon,” her first agent, a “blood-sucking serpent,” and when she spoke about a famous actress she’d worked with, she referred to her as “a complete waste of boobs”.

  After an hour during which I smiled, laughed and listened, she stopped without warning and said, “It was awful when everything fell apart, that was in the early seventies—when suddenly I was no longer funny, but what really bothered me was the way my husband took it. He stopped talking to me and started spending his days in front the television.”

  I told her then when she grew quiet, looking away from me, that I kept seeing Philip the way he was on the night when he found her and her son on the back road. I would never know if what I imagined about that night actually happened, there was no way I could, but I did know how clearly I imagined it. He was in the glassed-in cab of the plow in the midst of the storm, carving a trail through the snow, a blanketed silence settling, disturbed only by the noise from the engine and the blades. And now when I thought of him there, I knew his thoughts would have been about the woman he’d fallen in love with, not his life with me and Thomas. He’d be thinking of the way she looked at her desk, the idle chatter, their shared smiles. She would have been the light in his mind he could not resist, a light where once there was only the dark monotony of his routine. And then I’d think about how I existed for him: the wife, the slippered, shuffling wife, with the sleepy look and worn nightgown, making coffee. “How did this happen?” I asked the comedienne. “How did I become this person?”

  “You know, I remember very little about the accident except for your husband looking at us through the window. It seemed he stood there a long time and his face had a look on it—a kind of, what? What would you call it? A kind of wonder or maybe it was fear,” she said. “But I knew that this man was going to help us, that everything would be all right.”

  Until that moment I’d been reluctant to recall the conversation with Philip before he left, but now I thought of him sitting at the dining room table. He still had his boots on and the snow was melting on the oriental carpet, he held his hat in his hand, lifting it for emphasis as he spoke. And the words he said made me realize the power of language to hold truth or betrayal, that those words alone were enough to shatter everything I’d come to rely on.

  “I was surprised,” I said, “that a life could be so quickly altered. One day it’s fine, and the next everything’s different.” I continued, “Actually I’ve been thinking that maybe I walked away a long time ago. Philip always seemed as if he wanted to be alone and then there was Tom, his hockey, and school stuff. I know I went ages when I hardly thought about Philip in any real way.” I picked at some lint on my trousers. “My life was pretty full and it’s not like we weren’t there, living tog
ether, fixing the house up, you know. I always thought of us as a team.”

  Night was moving in and the snowfall, which had been light when I arrived, was now thick. When I rose to leave she said, “So, maybe in the long run you got what you wanted?”

  “It’s a strange thing to think, but it would make it easier, wouldn’t it, if I could believe that.” And I remembered the morning after Philip left, I had laid in bed with the blankets flowed over me in soft curves like snow caught in yards and beneath I felt my body stir as I imagined spring stirred under the cold.

  She smoothed the sheet and said, “I should tell you I’m probably leaving soon. My son wants me to go home, see my own doctor. I think he doesn’t trust them here.”

  How small she was, surely no more than five feet, with circles of rouge on her cheeks like a doll, and her eyes made up with blue shadow. “Well, I hope I see you again before you leave,” I said.

  z

  But I did not see her again. When I came the next day, she was gone. At the nurse’s station they said she’d left that morning, that she signed herself out or rather that her son made her sign herself out. “Oh yes,” I said. “She said she might leave so that she could visit her own doctor in California.”

  The nurse looked up at me and said, “Or perhaps her son didn’t like what we found.”

  On the street alone, I tucked my chin against the cold into the scarf around my neck and listened to the huge sound of my trudging through the snow. I was following the route I walked with Philip the day he told me he was leaving. Here were the same fields of encrusted snow over bent cornstalks, the same distant trees on the horizon, a line of grey, like smudged charcoal, and then a wind that swept across the field, assaulting me with renewed cold. I wondered what the nurse meant, but when I arrived home I stopped thinking about the hospital or the comedienne, when my son met me at the front door. He was angry. “I didn’t know he was gone,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”