A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [30]
I can never handle this kind of thing properly. What’s behind it can never be brought out. She’d only deny, and be stricken and wounded. Maybe she really doesn’t know what she’s saying. She half convinces me, all the same, because it is true that something might happen when I’m away, and then what? All my fault. It worries me, anyway, even apart from whose fault.
“Maybe I shouldn’t go.” Do I mean this?
“No, no. You go ahead, dear. It isn’t so often that you – and I’ll be perfectly fine. After all, you’re young. I must expect to be a bit lonely sometimes.”
“I’m sorry.” We could pace this treadmill indefinitely.
“You never said who it was, dear. It doesn’t matter in the least, but it does hurt me just a little when you don’t even –”
“Nick Kazlik.”
“Who? I don’t believe I –”
“I told you the other day that I met him on the street. Nick Kazlik.”
Mother, flitting around the livingroom, having suddenly decided that the pictures all need straightening, pauses with one small white mauve-veined hand on the autumn-coloured print of The Strawberry Girl.
“You mean the milkman’s son?”
The milkman’s son. The undertaker’s daughter. But she wouldn’t laugh. I must be very calm and careful. Anything else is useless.
“The same.”
An infant sigh bubbles from her lips.
“Well, of course – I mean, it’s your business, dear. You go ahead and have a nice time.”
If only once she’d say what she means, and we could have it out. But she won’t. Maybe it would be worse if she did. I don’t know.
Doorbell. Quick – I must get her pills for her, first. They are on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet so that no one will take them by mistake. She can’t reach that high.
“Here – they’re on top of the TV. Is there anything else you need?”
“No, no.” She has moved on to the straightening of a simpering puce-mouthed Madonna. “I told you, dear – I’ll be quite all right. I may just get started on the laundry.”
“Mother – you’re not to! You know you mustn’t lift things, or strain too much. I’ll do it tomorrow morning.”
Doorbell again.
“Well, Rachel dear, I only thought I might as well get going on it, as I haven’t anything much to do.”
“Please.”
She glances at me with the innocent guile I’ve seen so often on the faces of my children.
“I’ll see how I feel, dear. I only thought I might as well be doing something useful.”
“Promise me not to. Please.”
“We’ll see. There are those blankets we’ve been meaning to wash all spring –”
“Mother!”
Why does she do this now? Why not half an hour ago, when I would have had the time to cajole. That’s why she didn’t, then, of course.
“All right. All right. Wash them if you like. I can’t stop you, can I?”
Going down the stairs, rapidly, my heels clattering, I can see again the astonished disbelief on her face. I can’t believe, myself, that I could have said what I did. What an awful thing to say. I don’t care. I don’t give a damn. I’ll care later. Not right now.
“Hi.”
Nick is leaning against the door frame, looking up at the neon sign, to which Hector Jonas has recently added a refinement. It now goes off and on, automatically, like the delphinium blinking of eyes.
“Hello. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”
“That’s okay. You’re looking very nice.”
“Oh. Thank you.” My black linen, sleeveless, with the gold pin on the shoulder. But now I wonder if it isn’t too dressy. Only a movie, after all. Maybe I should have worn my blue and white cotton. Too late now. Will he think it looks as though I don’t know what to wear? Or that I’m giving some kind of importance to this evening? That’s not so. It isn’t so at all. If I speak quite coolly, he’ll realize it.
“I see what you mean about the sign,” Nick says as we get into his car.
“I hate living here.” This is the last thing in the world I ever intended to say. He’ll say Why don’t you move, then? Or think what