A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [7]
“Asparagus rolls, I thought,” she says earnestly, “and that celery and ham mixture. I’ve got it made. All you have to do is spread them. Can you do the asparagus rolls or shall I do those first?”
“I can do them. It’s all right.”
“Well, we could do them and put them in the fridge. It might be easier.”
“If you like. We’ll do them after dinner, then.”
“I don’t mind, dear – whatever you like,” she says, believing she means it.
How strange it is that I do not even know how old she is. She’s never told me, and I’m not supposed to ask. In the world she inhabits, age is still as unmentionable as death. Am I as far away as that, from the children who aren’t mine? She’s in her seventies, I can guess with reasonable accuracy, as she bore me late, but the exact positioning is her wealth, a kept secret. And it matters. It means something. Does she think someone cares whether she’s sixty or ninety?
I could have gone to Willard’s for dinner. I could have gone with Calla. I wish I had. Now that it comes to it, I do not know why I didn’t, one or the other.
It’s her only outlet, her only entertainment. I can’t begrudge her. Anyone decent would be only too glad.
As I am, really, at heart. I’ll feel better, more fortified, when I’ve had dinner. I don’t begrudge it to her, this one evening of bridge with the only three long long friends. How could I? No one decent would.
Thank God, thank God. They are finally gone. The last cup is washed and put away. The living-room is tidied enough to suit her. It might be the midsummer gathering of a coven, the amount of fuss we go to, lace tablecloth, the Spode china, the silver tray for sandwiches, the little dishes of salted nuts to nibble at. Well, it’s only at our place once a month. I can’t complain, really. And it is nice for her. She enjoys it. Her face grows animated and her voice almost gay – “Verla, you’re not going into no-trump – you wouldn’t dare! Oh girls isn’t she the meanest thing you ever saw?” She doesn’t have much to interest her these days. She never reads a book and can’t bear music. Her life is very restricted now. It always was, though. It’s never been any different. Just this house and her dwindling circle of friends. She and Dad had given up conversing long ago, by the time I was born. She used to tell him not to lean back in the upholstered chairs, in case his hair oil rubbed off. Then she put those crocheted doilies on all the chair backs. And finally on the chair arms as well, as though she felt his hands could never be clean, considering what he handled in his work. Maybe she didn’t feel that way at all. Maybe it only seemed so to me.
This bedroom is the same I’ve always had. I should change the furniture. How girlish it is, how old-fashioned. The white spindly-legged dressing-table, the round mirror with white rose-carved frame, the white-painted metal bed with its white-painted metal bow decorating the head like a starched forgotten hair-ribbon. Surely I could afford new furniture. It’s my salary, after all, my salary we live on. She’d say it was a waste, to throw out perfectly good furniture. I suppose it would be, too, if you think of it like that.
I always brush my hair a hundred strokes. I can’t succeed in avoiding my eyes in the mirror. The narrow angular face stares at me, the grey eyes too wide for it.
I don’t look old. I don’t look more than thirty. Or do I see my face falsely? How do I know how it looks to anyone else? About six months ago, one of the salesmen who was calling on Hector Jonas, downstairs, asked me out and like an idiot I went. We went to the Regal Café for dinner, and I thought every minute someone I knew would see me and know he sold embalming fluid. Of course someone has to sell it. But when he told me I had good bones, it was too much. As though he were one of the ancient Egyptians who interred the pharaohs and knew too intimately the secrets of the core and marrow. Do I have good bones? I can’t tell. I’m no judge.
Go to bed, Rachel. And hope to sleep.
The voices of the girls, the old ladies, still echo, the prattling, the